Economics & Development

Distribution sensitive welfare and poverty measures are designed to respond to low values of individual income or consumption. However, very small positive values can have an extreme influence on many distribution sensitive measures, and some measures are not defined for nonpositive values. Although income or consumption is often truncated or bottom-coded at some strictly positive threshold to avoid these difficulties, it is unclear where the threshold should be drawn and data providers follow different practices. This paper systematically explores various options for bottom-coding consumption and income distributions when calculating summary welfare and poverty measures for cross-country and over-time comparisons. Using more than 800 consumption surveys from across the world and employing various methodologies, the paper suggests that $0.25 per person per day in 2017 purchasing power parity is a suitable bottom-coding threshold in this setting.

Strong and resilient economic growth in Côte d’Ivoire has not translated into poverty reduction at the expected pace in recent years. Despite ranking among the top performers in economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa between 2011 and 2023, and standing out for its resilience, Côte d’Ivoire has made a modest progress in reducing poverty over that period. One percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita translates into a relative reduction in the poverty rate of just 0.6 percent, below the average for Sub-Saharan Africa (1.1 percent) and the rest of the world (2.2 percent). One of the reasons why economic growth contributes very little to poverty reduction in Côte d’Ivoire is the low productive capacities (linked to human and nonhuman capital) of the Ivorian workforce.

This year, the Subnational B-READY series covers 66 cities across six EU Member States - Czechia, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Spain - covering 64 European regions. In Greece, Subnational B-READY covers six cities in six regions at the NUTS2 level: Alexandroupoli (Eastern Macedonia and Thrace), Athens (Attica), Heraklion (Crete), Larissa (Thessaly), Patra (Western Greece), and Thessaloniki (Central Macedonia). The primary objective of the Subnational B-READY studies is to identify and address regional disparities in regulatory environments and to promote reforms that foster private sector growth, job creation, and sustainability. The Subnational B-READY series delivers a rigorous, data-driven analysis of business climates at the local level, offering actionable insights for policy makers.