Other Poverty Study

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  • Publication
    Drivers of Poverty Reduction in Lao PDR
    (World Bank, Vientiane, 2015-10-01) World Bank Group
    Poverty in Lao PDR declined from 33.5 percent to 23.2 percent over the 10 year period between 2002/3 and 2012/13. The number of poor people declined by about half a million to 1.35 million in 2013 and Lao PDR has met its MDG target of reducing poverty to below 24 percent by 2015. Improvements in welfare are evident in the changes in other socio-economic indicators such as the ownership of televisions and access to electricity, which doubled, and the number of households living in houses built with bricks or concrete, which nearly tripled, while the proportion of those without a toilet halved. Net secondary enrollment increased from 27 percent in 2002/3 to 50 percent in 2012/13 showing significant improvements in education.
  • Publication
    Poverty and Shared Prosperity in Brazil's Metropolitan Regions: Taking Stock and Identifying Priorities
    (Washington, DC, 2015-07-08) World Bank Group
    In the 20th Century, Brazil rapidly urbanized and is now not only an urban nation but a metropolitan one. Brazils sprawling regioes metropolitanas (metropolitan regions, or RMs, which are municipal clusters) are now home to almost 50 million people and much of the countrys economic vitality. The RM spatial level and its supporting governmental institutions have thus become critical to Brazils future development. While challenges remain for tackling deprivation in rural areas, poverty in Brazil is now predominantly urban. More than six in 10 Brazilians in extreme poverty were living in urban settings as of 2012. Of these, over a fourth was concentrated in the 10 largest RMs.
  • Publication
    The Socio-Economic Impacts of Ebola in Sierra Leone: Results from a High Frequency Cell Phone Survey, Round 3
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06-15) Himelein, Kristen; Testaverde, Mauro; Turay, Abubakarr; Turay, Samuel
    As of June 7, 2015, Sierra Leone had reported more than 12,900 cases of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), and over 3,900 deaths since the outbreak began. In recent months, substantial progress has been made, with a maximum of 15 new cases per week reported following a nationwide lockdown and information campaign at the end of March. The Government of Sierra Leone, with support from the World Bank Group, has been conducting mobile phone surveys with the aim of capturing the key socio-economic effects of the virus. Three rounds of data collection have been conducted, in November 2014, January-February 2015, and May 2015. The survey was given to household heads for whom cell phone numbers were recorded during the nationally-representative Labor Force Survey conducted in July and August 2014. Overall, 66 percent of the 4,199 households sampled in that survey had cell phones, although this coverage was uneven across the country, with higher levels in urban areas (82 percent) than rural areas (43 percent). Of those with cell phones, 51 percent were surveyed in all three rounds, and 79 percent were reached in at least one round. The results for the third round of the survey, which contacted 1,715 households, focus mainly on employment, agriculture, food security and prices, and health service utilization, covering predominantly urban areas where cell phone coverage is highest, but including rural areas as much as possible given the sample available.
  • Publication
    Alternative Social Safety Nets in South Sudan: Costing and Impact on Welfare Indicators -- Poverty Note
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06) Pape, Utz; Pontara, Nicola
    The purpose of this note is to provide the monetary cost of various social safety net targeting schemes that can be deployed to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience. It is believed that gradually switching to the provision of social safety nets can reduce the chronic dependency on humanitarian (mainly food) aid. At the same time, it could help to alleviate reliance on patronage networks and switch a portion of the public spending from unproductive uses (e.g., military expenditure) toward strengthening the resilience and supporting the livelihoods of South Sudanese. In addition, a social safety net would address the fatigues of years of weak governance and ongoing efforts to find more direct, transparent ways to enable citizens to reap the benefits of independence and – once it materializes – peace.
  • Publication
    Ghana Work Program (FY15): Poverty and Inequality Profile
    (Washington, DC, 2015-06) World Bank
    Since 1991 the national poverty rate of Ghana has more than halved. The estimated national headcount poverty ratio fell by 31.2 percentage points from 52.6 percent in 1991 to 21.41 percent in 2012. Heterogeneity of poverty outcomes is, however, high both across urban and rural areas and across regions. The robustness of these poverty trends is checked with trends of five correlates: urbanization and rural-urban migration, remittances, asset growth, labor market transformations, and agricultural productivity growth. Urbanization turns out to be highly correlated with poverty reduction. Poverty trends and asset index trends turn out to follow a similar pattern in both urban and rural areas and by regions: asset index increase where poverty decreases. In the report the authors try to understand the drivers of recent decrease in poverty in northern regions. The attention is focused on two different aspects, the agricultural productivity growth and the inflation patterns. In northern regions, there is a generalized increase in production of main food crops and an increase in productivity. To test the contribution of most of these drivers to poverty reduction, the authors estimated unconditional quintile regressions over the 20th, 40th, and 60th percentiles and decomposed the results using the Oaxaca Blinder method. To further strengthen the spatial analysis of poverty the authors constructed a new poverty map based on sixth Ghana living standard survey (GLSS 6) (conducted in 2012-13) in combination with the 2010 census, which was then compared with the 2000 map. This profile focuses on inequalities seen from three different perspectives: consumption inequality, inequalities of opportunities, and polarization.
  • Publication
    Kyrgyz Republic: Food Prices and Household Welfare
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05-28) World Bank Group
    Between 2008 and 2012 the urban/rural poverty divide substantially narrowed down, which was the result of relatively stable rural and rising urban poverty rates. Over the same period, food inflation spiked, whereby strong links between domestic and global price movements were observed owed to major import dependence on food. The high shares of consumption that households dedicate to food, especially among the poor, leave limited scope to deal with food price surges by economizing on non-food expenditure. Food price increases of 5, 10, and 15 percent are estimated to increase poverty rates between 2 and 5 percentage points in the baseline scenario.
  • Publication
    Kyrgyz Republic: Poverty Profile for 2013
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05-21) World Bank Group
    Over the last decade, the Kyrgyz Republic experienced volatile but positive economic growth. Since the early 2000s, the share of working age population has been growing robustly and foreign labor markets have been an important source of employment. The Kyrgyz Republic has achieved large reductions in poverty over the past decade, but in recent years progress has diminished. During 2003-2012, the Kyrgyz Republic saw significant convergence between urban and rural poverty rates. Poverty reduction during 2003-2013 was driven mostly by growth rather than redistribution.
  • Publication
    Labor Migration and Welfare in the Kyrgyz Republic (2008-2013)
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05-08) World Bank Group
    This paper examines the impact of labor migration from a welfare and social development perspective. Rather than focusing on regulatory and legal aspects determining migration, this note centers on the impacts of migration on the domestic welfare of households in the Kyrgyz Republic. The profiling of labor migration and identification of knowledge gaps are used to inform the development of strategies for more effective and sustainable welfare impacts from labor migration and remittances.
  • Publication
    FYR of Macedonia: Measuring Welfare using the Survey of Income and Living Conditions
    (Washington, DC, 2015-05) World Bank
    This note expands the analysis on poverty and income distribution reported by the FYR Macedonia SSO for 2010 and 2011. The present work is based on an analysis performed in-situ by World Bank staff on the offices of the FYR Macedonian SSO.
  • Publication
    Braving the Storm: Poverty and Inequality in Bosnia and Herzegovina 2007-2011
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05) World Bank; Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina; FBiH Institute for Statistics; RS Institute for Statistics; AGe
    This note describes the trends in, and composition of, absolute poverty based on household expenditures, and is thus concerned, as a matter of policy objectives, with access of the population to a particular minimum standard of living. This should be viewed as complementary to the companion note on social exclusion based on Europe 2020 indicators including the relative at-risk-of-poverty (AROP) rate, focuses on low income in relation to other residents in a given country. In addition to the analysis of absolute poverty, the note also presents an analysis of inclusive growth, aimed at assessing whether income growth (losses) benefit (impact) differentially the lowest part (here, bottom forty percent) of the distribution. Other approaches, such as those including measures of poverty based on current income, or self-reported measures of affordability, or approached that differ in the way they set the poverty threshold exist. The choice of World Bank’s methodology for purposes of this report is primarily on pragmatic grounds: (i) it allows for the analysis of trends during 2007-2011; (ii) the same methodology was adopted in the previous report (World Bank 2009) to analyze poverty trends during 2004-2007, thus providing a longer trend; (iii) it allows for comparisons of trends across the entities of BiH.