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Building Public Support for Reducing Fossil Fuel Subsidies: Evidence across 12 Middle-Income Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-29)This study examines which factors influence support for reducing fossil fuel subsidies and what types of information shift people’s views through surveying 37,000 respondents across 12 middle-income countries that provided over US$750 billion in explicit and implicit subsidies for fossil fuels in 2022. Respondents were randomly allocated to receive information about the relative cost of fossil fuel subsidies, how they are regressive, or worsen climate change and air pollution. They were then asked about their support for reforms with and without accompanying policies. These treatments, particularly about environmental damage, increased support for reforms in countries that primarily subsidize gasoline and among respondents who perceive themselves to be middle class. Around 30 percent of respondents supported reducing fossil fuel subsidies in isolation, but this share increased to over 95 percent if accompanying policies were implemented. These findings help inform governments about how to build public support for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies. -
Publication
Updating Poverty in Afghanistan Using the SWIFT-Plus Methodology
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-29)Close to half of the population of Afghanistan was living below the national poverty line prior to the regime change in August 2021, with no additional information on poverty collected in the country since the last official household survey in 2019/20. This paper fills this knowledge gap through survey-to-survey imputation using a SWIFT-plus methodology. The analysis trains a predictive model on data from the 2019/20 Expenditure and Labor Force survey and imputes poverty in the latest Afghanistan Welfare Monitoring Survey. The analysis accounts for seasonality in welfare patterns and implements several tests to assess the model’s predictive capacity. The results show that 48.3 percent of the Afghan population was poor as of April–June 2023, a relative decline of 4 percentage points compared to poverty levels observed over the same months in 2020. The reduction in poverty was concentrated among rural households, with a decline from 51 to 44 percent, while it stagnated in urban areas at around 58 percent. Although no poverty data exists since 2020, the evolution of self-reported welfare and food security makes it reasonable to conclude that poverty first increased during the immediate economic contraction following the regime change and has progressively declined since then. -
Publication
Tunisia Country Climate and Development Report
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-29)This Climate Change and Development Report (CCDR) establishes the case for a new economic model to address Tunisia’s challenging economic and social context and vulnerability to climate change. Building on extensive analyses and consultations (see Box 1 for our approach), the CCDR calls for a new model that emphasizes the role of the private sector in generating most jobs, while the state focuses on its regulating function, funding expenditures with the highest social and economic returns, and directing resources to interventions that are both economically and environmentally sustainable. The proposed model would involve major changes, such as using pricing to rationalize the consumption of resources and creating economic conditions that support private investments in climate adaptation and decarbonization. It would also involve a shift from recurrent public expenditures to public investments in adaptation and decarbonization. -
Publication
Where Is Poverty Concentrated?: New Evidence Based on Internationally Consistent Urban and Poverty Measurements
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-29)The lack of comparable urban definitions across countries has presented a significant challenge in effectively addressing poverty in both urban and rural areas. This study aims to tackle this issue by comparing subnational poverty statistics across countries, integrating internationally consistent definitions of urban areas into the World Bank’s official global poverty measurement framework. Focusing primarily on 16 Sub-Saharan African countries, the analysis reveals that poverty rates tend to be lower in densely populated urban areas. However, the findings also highlight that urban areas have a higher concentration of impoverished populations than previously estimated. These results underscore the importance of employing consistent urban definitions in cross-country poverty analysis and call for a reevaluation of geographically targeted policies to expedite poverty reduction efforts. -
Publication
Changes in Household Dynamics in South Yemen
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-11-29)This paper contributes to an important agenda by studying how female participation in household decision making has been affected by the ongoing civil conflict in the Republic of Yemen in areas under the control of the Internationally Recognized Government. The preliminary results find an increase in women’s participation in decision making since the start of the conflict. Using a difference-in-difference approach that controls for individual and household characteristics, the analysis finds that this result is driven by households living in districts with medium intensity conflict as compared to low intensity conflict. This result holds up to a series of robustness checks and is explained by changes in household composition, whereby men are more likely to leave the household in conflict affected districts, leaving women in charge of household decisions.