With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), world leaders made a bold pledge in 2015 to leave no one behind on the path of development by 2030. Half-way to the target date, some 22 countries…

Samuel Kofi Tetteh Baah, Christoph Lakner, Umar Serajuddin |

Myanmar's transition to an open market economy in 2011 led to significant gains in GDP per capita and poverty reduction.

Sutirtha Sinha Roy |

Why are fertilizer prices so high, and what can countries in Central America do about this?

Luis Flores, Viviana Perego, Diego Arias |

Costa Rica lost the momentum for poverty reduction towards the end of the twentieth century. This makes Costa Rica an outlier in a region that conti…

Jacobus de Hoop, Agustin Arakaki |

Central America and the Dominican Republic have a good track record of economic growth. Between 1991 and 2019, Central America grew by an average of 4.5% per year, and the Dominican Republic by an…

Michel Kerf |

The COVID-19 pandemic is devastating lives and livelihoods globally. Before the pandemic, the World Bank projected that 35 million people in East Asia and the Pacific would escape poverty in 2020…

Victoria Kwakwa |

[[tweetable]]Economic progress in East Asia and Pacific (EAP) has greatly contributed to the global reduction of extreme poverty. The more prosperous countries in the region – China, Thailand, and…

Judy Yang |

This year’s global poverty update from the World Bank is a minor one. Until reference year 2008, the World Bank published new poverty estimates every three years, and between 2010 and 2013 we…

Francisco Ferreira, Christoph Lakner, Carolina Sánchez-Páramo |

Students at Beijing Bayi High School in China. Photo: World Bank In 1950, the average working-age person in the world had  almost three years of education, but in East Asia and Pacific (EAP), the…

Michael Crawford |

Also available in: Myanmar (.pdf)   Struggles over land in Myanmar have been a defining characteristic of the country’s six decades of armed conflict.   In the past, government acquired lands for…

Anna Wellenstein |