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 |

Africa is not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty. While many countries were successful in reducing poverty during the years before the pandemic,…

Camilla Holmemo, Christian Bodewig, Robert S. Chase, Suleiman Namara |

Some of the Horn’s countries are among Africa’s poorest. The problems are daunting, but the region’s governments are taking bold steps to tackle them. They have launched the Horn of Africa…

Fatima Anjum Quraishi |

One year since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the level of education became the main predictor of joblessness in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. These four countries represent 34% of…

Ivette Maria Contreras-González, Gbemisola Oseni, Amparo Palacios-Lopez, Janneke Pieters, Michael Weber |

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

Luis Flores, Viviana Perego, Diego Arias |

The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the largest global shocks in recent history, but it did not increase extreme poverty in Africa as it was feared it would. The reason may be a combination of things…

Kibrom A. Abay, Nishant Yonzan, Sikandra Kurdi, Kibrom Tafere |

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 |

This blog is a biweekly feature highlighting recent working papers from around the World Bank Group. It introduces five papers published in August 2022 on various topics, including COVID-19…

Marcelo Buitron, Policy Research Working Paper team |

This study assesses the impacts of hosting refugees on the livelihood strategies of households in host communities focusing on diversification and agricultural commercialization. It uses a dataset…

Soazic Elise Wang Sonne, Solomon Zena Walelign, Ganesh Seshan |

Crop production losses are as significant from an aggregate economic perspective as they are a threat to the livelihoods of the poorest. A fine-grained and standardized way to measure this…

Yannick Markhof, Philip Randolph Wollburg, Giulia Ponzini |