World Bank Group
Mahler, D., Yonzan, N., Hill, R., Lakner, C., Wu, H., Yoshida, N.
2022-4-13
Article on understanding the changes in poverty since the beginning of the pandemic, also predicting poverty using growth forecasts available from before the pandemic as a counterfactual series. The difference between the actual and counterfactual series captures the effects of the pandemic—mostly for 2020—and then includes other factors such as the recovery (which was stronger than expected in some countries), inflationary pressures, and the conflict in Ukraine, especially for 2022.The baseline method assumes that all households within a country are equally impacted by rising prices. Yet we know that 80% of countries with data available experienced higher food inflation than non-food inflation in February (Ha et al., forthcoming). Poorer households tend to spend a larger share of their resources on food relative to non-food. This means that poorer households are likely to be hit harder by the current inflationary pressures, something that our baseline method misses. As such, our baseline could be too low an estimate of the impact of the unfolding crises on global poverty.
- COVID-19 Pandemic
- Economic
- Other Crises
- Ukraine War
- Africa
- Asia
- Bangladesh
- Cambodia
- Caribbean
- Central Asia
- East Africa
- East Asia
- Ethiopia
- Europe
- Global
- Horn of Africa
- India
- Latin America
- Middle East
- North Africa
- Sahel
- South America
- South Asia
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Uganda
- Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)
- Households
- Research
- Article
- Journal article
