Poverty Assessment

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Viet Nam - Bi-Annual Poverty and Equity Update: Towards More Inclusive Cities
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-27) World Bank
Recent poverty and equity dynamics in Viet Nam can be described across three distinct phases. First, at the start of the decade, there was rapid poverty reduction accompanied by declining inequality. From 2010-14, both poverty and inequality fell due to large shifts in labor from agriculture into manufacturing and services jobs. Most of these non-farm jobs were still low-skilled, and agricultural laborers could easily shift into these new jobs. This was followed by a period of poverty reduction but accompanied by slightly rising inequality from 2014-20. During this period, structural transformation continued, but as non-farm wages increased rapidly, farming income did not rise as quickly and more recently has even declined. Lastly, in 2022, after extended adverse impacts related to the COVID-19 pandemic, household consumption growth declined compared to 2020, and income growth slowed. Dynamics during this distinctive and short period from 2020 to 2022 is the focus of analysis in Part 1 of this report. Preserving gains and developing opportunities in urban areas are important for Viet Nam’s Next Mile to upper middle and high-income country status. Over the last decade, rapid economic growth was broadly inclusive and livelihoods in Viet Nam improved dramatically and in a progressive manner. Given the substantial success in poverty reduction, the poverty and equity agenda in Viet Nam today is no longer only about raising minimum living standards and tackling extreme poverty. It is also about creating new and sustainable economic pathways for a more aspirational population. Development and economic opportunities in urban areas are key to sustaining upwards economic mobility for the millions who have left poverty and now seek even higher economic gains.
Botswana Poverty Assessment: Renewing Pathways for Poverty and Inequality Reduction
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-31) World Bank
Botswana’s fast diamond-based growth, significant public investment, and political stability catapulted it into a stable upper-middle-income country and improved living standards. Despite its income status, the country faces multiple data challenges that limit its ability to make informed and effective policy decisions. The challenges include the availability, quality, and use of data, and a weak statistical infrastructure. Botswana does not conduct frequent income and expenditure surveys to track poverty. Using the available data, this poverty assessment presents poverty estimates up to 2016, preliminary poverty projections based on imputations into the 2019-2022 quarterly data and recent labor market trends. It also uses satellite and geospatial data to understand recent trends in electricity access and rainfall shocks after the negative poverty impact of the 2015 drought and electricity and water crises. Looking ahead, a recently completed Population and Housing Census and the upcoming 2024-2025 income and expenditure survey will fill other important data gaps. Yet, evidence-based policymaking requires Botswana to act on its commitment to invest in frequent, timely, and relevant data across its statistical system and strengthen its monitoring and evaluation.
Suriname Poverty and Equity Assessment
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-29) World Bank
This poverty and equity assessment aims to inform efforts to reduce poverty and inequality at what can be an important turning point for Suriname. The assessment draws heavily on a new survey of living conditions (SLC) carried out in 2022 to describe patterns of poverty and inequality. The poverty and equity assessment addresses some critical data gaps. Despite the dedication of many professionals and institutions in Suriname to data and evidence, until recently there were few reliable data sources to assess poverty and inequality after the economic crisis that started in 2020. Human capital deficiencies are important determinants of poverty and inequality in Suriname. Addressing them is crucial to enhance living standards. These human capital deficiencies, and poverty and inequality more generally, intersect with patterns of ethnic and geographic inequality that have their roots in Suriname’s history of colonial rule and slavery. Human capital deficiencies contribute to a skill shortage that, in addition to broader constraints to economic growth and doing business, is referenced by enterprises as a significant impediment to their operations. Suriname is missing out on opportunities to mitigate skill shortages, enhance growth, and reduce poverty by not capitalizing on women’s comparatively strong education performance. While Suriname placed significant emphasis on social assistance to address poverty in the aftermath of the economic crisis, improvements in the functioning of the social assistance system are needed to address poverty and inequality. For Suriname to continue its economic recovery, a focus on monetary and fiscal discipline remains key. In the medium term, when growth and oil revenues are expected to contribute to enhanced fiscal space, Suriname could consider bolder policy reforms to address poverty and inequality.
Lebanon Poverty and Equity Assessment 2024 - Weathering a Protracted Crisis
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-29) World Bank
This report provides an assessment of the current state of poverty and inequality in Lebanon. It documents the impact of a protracted economic crisis on households, that is well into its fifth year, along with their responses and investigates how the crisis has potentially affected labor market dynamics in the country. The report aims to be a resource for policymakers, researchers, and organizations working to identify and address the multifaceted socioeconomic challenges in Lebanon.
Yemen Poverty and Equity Assessment: Living in Dire Conditions
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-07) World Bank
This assessment overcomes these limitations to develop a holistic analysis of poverty in Yemen. It is possible to use data on key areas, such as food security and other forms of vulnerability, paired with rigorous analysis of key political economy developments since the outbreak of war, to tell the story of the country’s evolving poverty context. To achieve this, the assessment triangulates across multiple data sources including phone surveys, face-to-face surveys in IRG-controlledareas, geospatial data such as the agricultural stress index, and qualitative interviews with select in-country respondents and subject matter experts. The assessment first examines data on food insecurity—a good stand-in for poverty figures in highly stressed contexts such as Yemen’s—before examining available data on other dimensions of poverty.
Madagascar Poverty and Equity Assessment, February 2024: Navigating Two Decades of High Poverty and Charting a Course for Change in Madagascar
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-20) World Bank
This report provides an account of the evolution of poverty and living conditions in the decade 2012- 2022. It finds that at the national level monetary poverty essentially stagnated while urban poverty, admittedly a much smaller in absolute and relative terms, dramatically increased. In 2022, monetary poverty affected about 75 percent of the population, a share slightly above the 73 percent in 2012. Rural poverty remained roughly unchanged at about 80 percent of the rural population, but urban poverty increased from 42 to 56 percent over the decade. The increase in poverty was especially dramatic in secondary cities, where poverty increased from 46 to 61 percent (chapter 1). A closer look at the drivers of poverty reveals that the trends of the last decade are explained by market and governance failures, climatic shocks and the COVID pandemic. Structurally, stubbornly high rural poverty is the legacy of long-term infrastructure underinvestment, isolation, and low internal demand (World Bank Group, 2022). But since 2013, this structural failure to launch has also affected urban employment and living conditions as private investment has persistently declined and competition was suffocated by special interests. Moreover, the COVID pandemic, which caused an exceedingly long border closure and wiped out tourism revenues until mid-2022, and a repeated string of cyclones wreaked havoc on the service economy, destroying as many as a quarter of jobs and slashing urban incomes (chapter 3). About three-quarters of the population suffers from food insecurity, and this share has remained broadly unchanged for a decade or more. Most households, especially in rural areas, lack access to reliable electricity, safe water, or adequate sanitation. Access to healthcare is inadequate while high fertility, teenage pregnancy (about one-third of girls 15-19 is a mother already) and low education completion (only about half of all children complete primary school) erode future human capital (chapter 4). Climate resilience is a cross-cutting challenge. Madagascar is highly vulnerable to extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones, heavy rains, droughts, and heatwaves (chapter 5).
Central African Republic Poverty Assessment 2023: A Road Map Towards Poverty Reduction in the Central African Republic
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-12-06) World Bank
This report — the Central African Republic’s (CAR’s) first ever poverty assessment — draws on unparalleled microdata to propose practical strategies for lifting Central Africans out of poverty. Against the backdrop of a wide range of development challenges — including persistent low growth, conflict and displacement, andthe increasing threats posed by climate change –CAR urgently needs policies for reducing poverty. This report draws primarily on the 2021 Enquête Harmonisée sur le Conditions de Vie des Ménages (EHCVM), the first household survey suitable for poverty measurement conducted in CAR in more than a decade, to try and guidesuch policies. The report provides CAR’s headline poverty and inequality statistics, using the EHCVM’s unique sampling strategy to cover internally displaced persons (IDPs). The analysis goes beyond considerations of monetary poverty alone, assessing the extent of non-monetary deprivation in CAR, examining constraints onhuman capital development, and exploring the role that livelihoods — especially in agriculture — can play in lifting people out of poverty. Using geospatial data, the results are also linked to indicators of physical access to schools and health facilities as well as key elements of basic infrastructure. This Executive Summary highlights the poverty assessment’s key findings and outlines the policies that can kickstart CAR’s pathway towards poverty reduction.
Dominican Republic Poverty Assessment 2023: Fast Tracking Poverty Reduction and Prosperity for All
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-11-08) World Bank
In recent decades, economic growth in the Dominican Republic (DR) has been steady. However, growth has not occurred in such a way as to make the benefits widely and evenly available. In fact, although the DR economy grew faster than that of other LAC countries before the Covid-19 pandemic, its poverty rates and social outcomes remain broadly similar to them. This report seeks to explain this conundrum, as well as to expand the knowledge base to improve the effectiveness of ongoing poverty reduction policies in the DR. The Poverty Assessment draws primarily on new analytical work conducted in the DR, structured around four background notes on: (i) trends in monetary poverty and inequality, as well as the key drivers of those changes; (ii) nonmonetary poverty and its spatial dimensions; (iii) social assistance programs and their role in mitigating poverty; and (iv) climate change and its interaction with poverty. By helping to reduce the evidence gap in each of these areas, our analysis hopes to inform government policies and the national dialogue on poverty reduction. In addition, the note integrates existing analytical work and evidence produced inside and outside the Bank, including from its operations in the country.
Mozambique Poverty Assessment, June 2023: Poverty Reduction Setback in Times of Compounding Shocks
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-07-28) World Bank
This report relies on several data sources. The main source providing the poverty, inequality and labor figures herein is the 2019/20 Household Budget Survey (Inquérito sobre Orçamento Familiar, IOF2019/2020) conducted by the National Statistical Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estatística, INE) starting in November 2019 and spanning 13 months. The survey’s sample was drawn from the 2017 Census and allows for poverty figures to be representative at national and provincial as well as rural and urban levels. The fieldwork included data collection from 13,297 households interviewed across four quarters as in previous surveys, to account for seasonality effects like the impact on households’ consumption of relatively more abundant post-harvest periods. The starting point for the analysis is chapter 1, which synthesizes progress in reducing poverty between 2014-15 and 2019-20. This chapter also looks at the regional distribution of poverty, the impact of the pandemic, multidimensional poverty, the profile of the poor, changes in the responsiveness of poverty to growth, discusses trends in non-monetary dimensions of wellbeing, and simulates future poverty trends. Chapter 2 examines the distribution of growth and inequality reduction over the period, the pandemic’s impact, discusses the growth-poverty-inequality relationship, assesses the spatial dimensions of poverty, and estimates the Human Opportunity Index for Mozambique. Chapter 3 focuses on labor markets and provides insights into labor force participation, unemployment, underemployment, employment sectors, child labor, and labor market demand conditions. Chapter 4 presents a fiscal incidence analysis and information on transfers. Chapter 5 examines the relevance of environmental shocks, assesses the impact of weather events on agricultural production and night-time light radiance in urban areas. It also models poverty and distributional impacts of climate change shocks and presents findings on climate change literacy in Mozambique. Finally, chapter 6 discusses a variety of policy implications.
Uganda Poverty Assessment Overview: Strengthening Resilience to Accelerate Poverty Reduction in Uganda
(Washington, DC, 2023-06-01) World Bank
The share of Uganda’s population that lives below the poverty line has fluctuated over the last seven years, greatly influenced by shocks that have tested the resilience of the people. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed both urban and rural residents into poverty. Inequality, which reflects the extent to which different population groups benefit from Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, and affects the transmission of growth into poverty reduction, remained largely unchanged over this period and may even have worsened in urban areas. The findings of this report show that previously identified patterns and drivers of Uganda’s poverty changes persisted well into 2020 – shaped by low productivity and high vulnerability. Identified inequality of economic opportunities and unequal accumulation of the human capital could hold back structural change in employment. Accelerating poverty reduction in such a setting requires a two-pronged strategy. While at the macroeconomic level, policies addressing growth fundamentals are important for reducing poverty, from a microeconomic perspective, the report’s analysis shows that two strategies will be crucial. The first strategy is to lift the productivity and incomes of poor households in both rural and urban areas. While tackling agricultural productivity and job creation are at the top of the agenda here, making mobile phone services more widely accessible and affordable is a potential opportunity. The second strategy is to strengthen people’s resilience to shocks, particularly in rural areas. To have an impact, policies in both these areas will have to address the inequality in opportunities analyzed in the report. This document provides an overview of key report findings and identifies priority actions.