Economic Mobility in Europe and Central Asia: Exploring Patterns and Uncovering Puzzles

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Data Gaps, Data Incomparability, and Data Imputation: A Review of Poverty Measurement Methods for Data-Scarce Environments

“…(2015) for an introduction on this map. 32 Recent applications and further validations include Ferreira et al (2013), Cruces et al (2015) and Vakis et al (2015) for Latin American countries, Martinez et al (2013) for the Philippines, Garbero (2014) for Vietnam, Bourguignon and Moreno (2015) and Foster and Rothbaum (2015) for Mexico, Cancho et al (2015) for countries in Europe and Central Asia, Dang and Ianchovichina (2016) If panel data are available, we can estimate the quantities in (12) and (13); but in the absence of such data, we can use synthetic panels to study mobility. To operationalize the framework, we make two standard assumptions.…”

Poverty Dynamics in India between 2004 and 2012: Insights from Longitudinal Analysis Using Synthetic Panel Data

“…Nonetheless we investigate whether the 2009/10 and 2011/12 rounds are strictly comparable, since the possibility of a breakdown in comparability is prompted by the remarkable rate of poverty decline as well as evidence that there are some noticeable changes in the design of the consumption questionnaire between these two years. We note that there had been intensive and contentious debate around the comparability of the 1999/00 round of the NSS survey with earlier NSS rounds, after a certain number of changes and adjustments had been made to the 4 Synthetic panels constructed using the Dang et al (2014a) and Dang and Lanjouw (2013) methods have been applied to study poverty dynamics in various settings including multi-country analysis for Latin America (Ferreira et al, 2013;Vakis, Rigolini, and Lucchetti, 2015), South Asia (Rama et al, 2015), and Europe and Central Asia (Cancho et al, 2015). Specific country case studies using synthetic panels investigate countries including the Kyrgyz Republic (Bierbaum and Gassmann, 2012), Bhutan (World Bank, 2014), and Senegal (Dang, Lanjouw, and Swinkels, forthcoming).…”

To Impute or not to Impute? A Review of Alternative Poverty Estimation Methods in the Context of Unavailable Consumption Data

“…These include such variables as ethnicity, religion, language, place of birth, and parental education, which provide the connectors between different rounds of cross sections with the appropriate age adjustments. For example, the cohorts 23 For example, recent applications and further validations of these synthetic panels methods include Ferreira et al (2013), Cruces et al (2015), and Vakis et al (2015) for Latin American countries, Bourguignon, Moreno, and Dang (2018) and Foster and Rothbaum (2015) for Mexico, Balcazar et al (2018) for Colombia, Martinez et al (2013) for the Philippines, Garbero (2014) for Vietnam, Cancho et al (2015) for countries in Europe and Central Asia, Dang and Ianchovichina (forthcoming) for countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, Dang and Dabalen (in press) and Dang, Lanjouw and Swinkels (2017) for Sub-Saharan African countries, and Dang and Lanjouw (2017 and forthcoming) for India, Vietnam, and the United States. Researchers at international organizations including the UNDP and the Asian Development Bank have also applied these methods for analysis of welfare mobility (UNDP, 2016;Jha et al, 2018); see also OECD (2015) for an application by the OECD to study labor transitions in richer countries.…”