Vishwanath, Tara

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Vishwanath, Tara

Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

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Vishwanath, Tara, Vishwanath, T.

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Macroeconomics, Development, Labor Economics

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Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank

Last updated: August 6, 2024

Biography

Tara Vishwanath is a Lead Economist and a Global Lead of the Global Solutions Group for Welfare Implications of Climate, Fragility, and Conflict Risks in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank. Prior to joining the Africa Region, she led the poverty program in Middle East and North Africa and South Asia regions. Before joining the World Bank, she was a professor of economics at Northwestern University and has published widely in leading international economics journals on economic theory, labor economics, and development. She holds a doctorate in economics from Cornell University.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 33

How Much Does the Food Insecurity Experience Scale Overlap with Poor Food Consumption and Monetary Poverty? Evidence from West Africa
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-10-12) Lain, Jonathan; Tandon, Sharad; Vishwanath, Tara
The Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), which combines three food-access dimensions into a single indicator, is rapidly being incorporated into national statistical systems. However, there is no prediction about how one of the incorporated dimensions, subjective experiences associated with food insecurity, overlaps with poor food consumption. Using data from West Africa, this study illustrates that in 4 out of 10 countries, there is a similar prevalence of food insecurity according to the FIES among segments of the population that are likely undernourished and segments that are likely not undernourished. And in 5 out of 10 countries, there is a relatively large prevalence of food insecurity according to the FIES in the segments of the population that are least likely to be undernourished. Combined, the results offer guidance to policymakers when choosing food-access indicators and illustrate the importance of using the FIES along with other food-access measures.
Making Data Count: Estimating a Poverty Trend for Nigeria between 2009 and 2019
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2023-11-01) Lain, Jonathan; Schoch, Marta; Vishwanath, Tara
Monitoring poverty reduction requires frequent microdata on household welfare that can be compared over time. Such data are unavailable in many countries, given limited statistical capacity, shocks that prevent data collection, and regular improvements to survey methodology. This paper demonstrates how jointly deploying back casting and survey-to-survey imputations can help to overcome this in a setting where estimating a poverty trend is badly needed, given the scale of the poverty-reduction challenge, but where survey-to-survey imputations are more likely to succeed and can be directly tested. In Nigeria, the most recent official survey that can be used to construct an imputation model was collected through the same methodology and in the same year as the target survey. This data landscape could arise in other settings where the methodology for smaller, interstitial surveys is updated more quickly than for larger, official consumption surveys. Naively comparing Nigeria’s last two official consumption surveys would suggest that the poverty rate fell by 17 percentage points between 2009 and 2019. Yet the methods presented in this paper both suggest a much smaller reduction in poverty of between 3 and 7 percentage points, echoing Nigeria’s performance on nonmonetary welfare indicators over the same period. The paper therefore provides guidance on when and how back casting and survey-to-survey imputation techniques can be most valuable for monitoring poverty reduction.
Capturing Sensitive Information from Difficult-to-Reach Populations: Evidence from a Novel Internet-Based Survey in Yemen
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09) Tandon, Sharad; Vishwanath, Tara
As conflicts across the globe escalate and data collection in these settings becomes more sensitive, policy makers and researchers are forced to turn to alternative methods for accurately collecting vital information. This paper assesses the ability of novel and anonymous internet-based surveys to elicit sensitive information in the Republic of Yemen's conflict by comparing identical sensitive and non-sensitive questions in an internet survey to a concurrent mobile phone survey. There were significant differences between the modalities in all the sensitive questions, with a greater share of respondents expressing sensitive views in the internet survey. The differences between modalities was larger for sensitive questions than for non-sensitive questions, and all the differences were qualitatively identical for subsets of the sample that are underrepresented in internet surveys. Overall, the results suggest that internet surveys can be an effective tool to use in conjunction with other techniques to acquire information that would otherwise be difficult to collect.
Should the Food Insecurity Experience Scale Crowd Out Other Food Access Measures?: Evidence from Nigeria
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-08) Lain, Jonathan; Tandon, Sharad; Vishwanath, Tara
Measurement of food access typically relies on a consensus of different indicators. However, there is a growing list of surveys in which the Food Insecurity Experience Scale is one of the few food access indicators captured, likely because it is an official measure for tracking progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger. This paper uses a nationally representative, multipurpose household survey conducted in Nigeria to investigate the validity of the Food Insecurity Experience Scale. It compares the Food Insecurity Experience Scale to monetary poverty and a widely used food access metric that has been more extensively validated, the Food Consumption Score. Although it is possible for food access metrics to be poorly aligned and capture different dimensions of poor food access, empirically supported assumptions in standard consumption models result in many dimensions of poor food access being concentrated among the poorest segments of the population. However, the paper demonstrates that the Food Insecurity Experience Scale does not appear to correctly identify the population with poor food access—it finds little difference in the share with poor food access among poor and nonpoor Nigerians. Moreover, even the very richest and very poorest households have a similar prevalence of poor food access, according to the Food Insecurity Experience Scale. These patterns are in stark contrast to the Food Consumption Score, which suggests that food access is significantly lower for poorer Nigerians. Combined, the results demonstrate the importance of measuring food access with more than one indicator, and they call into question the notion of using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale alone, despite the measure being a key Sustainable Development Goal food security indicator.
Fragility and Conflict: On the Front Lines of the Fight against Poverty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-02-27) Corral, Paul; Irwin, Alexander; Krishnan, Nandini; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Vishwanath, Tara
Fragility and conflict pose a critical threat to the global goal of ending extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2015, successful development strategies reduced the proportion of the world’s people living in extreme poverty from 36 to 10 percent. But in many fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), poverty is stagnating or getting worse. The number of people living in proximity to conflict has nearly doubled worldwide since 2007. In the Middle East and North Africa, one in five people now lives in such conditions. The number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide has also more than doubled in the same period, exceeding 70 million in 2017. If current trends continue, by the end of 2020, the number of extremely poor people living in economies affected by fragility and conflict will exceed the number of poor people in all other settings combined. This book shows why addressing fragility and conflict is vital for poverty goals and charts directions for action. It presents new estimates of welfare in FCS, filling gaps in previous knowledge, and analyzes the multidimensional nature of poverty in these settings. It shows that data deprivation in FCS has prevented an accurate global picture of fragility, poverty, and their interactions, and it explains how innovative new measurement strategies are tackling these challenges. The book discusses the long-term consequences of conflict and introduces a data-driven classification of countries by fragility profile, showing opportunities for tailored policy interventions and the need for monitoring multiple markers of fragility. The book strengthens understanding of what poverty reduction in FCS will require and what it can achieve.
Estimating a Poverty Trend for Nigeria between 2009 and 2019
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-16) Lain, Jonathan William; Schoch, Marta; Vishwanath, Tara
Issues of data availability and incomparability in the measurement of household consumption arise frequently when measuring poverty trends over time. Yet, understanding these trends is key to guide national and international policy makers in their poverty reduction efforts. This paper aims to estimate a long-run poverty trend for Nigeria, a country whose poverty trends are crucial for regional and global estimates. In 2020, the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics released the first official poverty estimates for Nigeria in almost a decade, calculated using the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey. Yet the official poverty estimates from the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey cannot technically be compared with those from the 2009/10 Harmonized Nigerian Living Standards Survey—the previous official household consumption survey—given key differences in the way household consumption was measured and concerns around data quality in the 2009/10 survey. To address this challenge, this paper uses two distinct methodologies to construct a poverty trend for Nigeria in the decade before the COVID-19 crisis. First, it uses sector-level gross domestic product growth rates combined with micro-data from the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey to “backcast” poverty rates back to 2009. Second, it uses survey-to-survey imputation methods and data collected throughout the decade through the General Household Survey panel. Despite their very different foundations, these two approaches produce very similar results, suggesting that there was a small reduction in poverty at the beginning of the decade, followed by a period of stagnation or even a slight uptick in poverty following the 2016 economic recession. The paper estimates a poverty rate of between 42.2 and 46.3 percent in 2009, translating into a reduction in the poverty headcount rate of between 3 and 7 percentage points between 2009 and 2018/19.
Data Triangulation Strategies to Design a Representative Household Survey of Hosts and Rohingya Displaced in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-05-11) Endara, Joaquin; Genoni, Maria Eugenia; Khan, Afsana Iffat; Kosmidou-Bradley, Walker Turnbull; Munoz, Juan Eduardo; Palaniswamy, Nethra; Vishwanath, Tara
Obtaining representative information on hosts and displaced populations in a single survey is not straightforward. This paper demonstrates the value of combining traditional and nontraditional sampling frames, geospatial information, and listing exercises to design a representative survey of hosts and Rohingya displaced populations in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The paper applies innovative segmentation techniques using geospatial data to delimit enumeration areas in the absence of updated cartography. The paper also highlights the importance of listing exercises to inform stratification decisions and update population counts.
COVID-19 in Nigeria: Frontline Data and Pathways for Policy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-11) Lain, Jonathan William; Vishwanath, Tara; Alik-Lagrange, Arthur; Amankwah, Akuffo; Contreras-Gonzalez, Ivette; Jenq, Christina; Mcgee, Kevin; Oseni, Gbemisola; Palacios-Lopez, Amparo; Sagesaka, Akiko
The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and its economic and social effects on households have created an urgent need for timely data to help monitor and mitigate the social and economic impacts of the crisis and protect the welfare of Nigerian society. To monitor how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the economy and people of Nigeria and to inform policy interventions and responses, the National Bureau of Statistics with technical support from the World Bank implemented the Nigeria COVID-19 National Longitudinal Phone Survey (NLPS) from April 2020 to April 2021. This report draws on NLPS and other relevant data to analyze COVID-19 impacts in Nigeria’s human capital, livelihoods and welfare. It also looks ahead to the broad challenges of building back better in Nigeria and summarizes priorities for policymaking and implementation.
Coping with the Influx: Service Delivery to Syrian Refugees and Hosts in Jordan, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, Iraq
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Russo Riva, Flavio; Krishnan, Nandini; Sharma, Dhiraj; Vishwanath, Tara
The Syrian crisis has led to rapid and large-scale population displacement. This paper uses several sources of data, including the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees' registration database and multi-country, multi-topic surveys collected in 2015-16, to characterize service delivery in the context of a rapid influx of displaced populations. The study encompasses infrastructure services, such as electricity and garbage disposal, and social services, such as health and education, and considers both measures of access to services and their perceived quality.
The Lives and Livelihoods of Syrian Refugees in the Middle East: Evidence from the 2015-16 Surveys of Syrian Refugees and Host Communities in Jordan, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, Iraq
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Russo Riva, Flavio; Krishnan, Nandini; Sharma, Dhiraj; Vishwanath, Tara
The Syrian crisis has led to rapid and large-scale population displacement. This paper has two main aims. (i) It documents the size and timing of the Syrian refugee influx into Jordan, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, characterizing the forced nature of displacement and exploring factors that influenced the decision to flee and subsequently move within the host country. (ii) The paper describes the daily living conditions of refugees after displacement, documenting vulnerability along several dimensions, such as housing access and quality, labor market attachment, and financial security. The data sources include the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' registration database and multi-country, multi-topic surveys conducted in 2015-16.