Other Poverty Study
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Publication
Capacity Building in Fiscal Incidence Analysis: Lessons and Reflections from the Field
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-28)Fiscal Incidence Analysis (FIA) is the study of how fiscal policies benefit (or burden, in the case of taxes) people and households at different parts of the income distribution. The objective of this note is to highlight lessons learned in capacity building and skill transfer for FIA, including Commitment to Equity (CEQ) assessment. The goal is to uncover effective strategies for transferring the skills and capacities to government officials and other fiscal experts in countries around the world to enable them to carry out this type of analysis themselves. The note is based on interviews with experts, both within and outside of the World Bank who have been conducting FIA assessments and building and using microsimulation tools, often in close collaboration with officials from the government. The rest of this note: (i) describes the common engagement models and capacity building approaches that have been taken; (ii) assesses the extent to which these have been successful and distils lessons learned from some of these efforts, and (iii) identifies a few concrete ways in which similar efforts in the future could be made more effective. -
Publication
The Middle Class in the Philippines: An Exploration of the Conditions for Upward Mobility
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06-19)A decade of rapid economic growth has supported upward mobility and the expansion of the middle class in the Philippines. While the Philippines’ record of economic growth has been sound, many East Asian countries have performed better, resulting in higher levels of economic mobility and more rapid middle-class expansion. This study aims to inform these efforts through an in-depth examination of varying factors that affect upward mobility and middle-class expansion in the Philippines. -
Publication
Using Remittance Transaction Data for Timely Estimation of the Foreign Worker Population in Malaysia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06-06)Malaysia has been grappling with understanding how many foreign workers reside in the country and thus faces challenges in formulating evidence-based foreign worker policies. This paper investigates how to use micro-level remittance transaction data collected from money transfer service providers to estimate the number of foreign workers. Most foreign workers remit a large portion of their earnings to support family members back home. They are low-income earners, are sensitive to remittance costs, and thus opt for money transfer service providers to remit money rather than regular banks, where transfer services are more expensive. Therefore, the remittance data provide a useful source to conduct the investigation. Existing estimates range from two to five million foreign workers; our results narrow that range considerably, estimating a total of 2.99 million to 3.16 million foreign workers in Malaysia as of 2017–18. State and nationality distributions of foreign workers in our estimates are consistent with the Ministry of Home Affairs data, lending support to the validity of our estimates. Nevertheless, authors note that the Bank Negara Malaysia remittance data could potentially underestimate the number of workers in states with low access to money service providers, as well as nationalities that have access to alternative money transfer mechanisms such as commercial banking and informal transfer channels. -
Publication
Braving the Storm: Poverty and Inequality in Bosnia and Herzegovina 2007-2011
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05)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.