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Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys around the world haven not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from clear, and the direction of the impact cannot be established a priori, since consumption of food away from home affects both food consumption and the poverty line. This paper exploits rich data on food away from home collected as part of the National Household Survey in Peru, shedding light to the extent to which welfare measures differ depending on whether they properly account for food away from home. Peru is a relevant context, with the average Peruvian household spending 28 percent of their food budget on food away from home by 2010. The analysis indicates that failure to account for the consumption of food away from home has important implications for poverty and inequality measures as well as the understanding of who the poor are. First, accounting for food away from home results in extreme poverty rates that are 18 percent higher and moderate poverty rates that are 16 percent lower. These results are also consistent, in fact more pronounced, with poverty gap and severity measures. Second, consumption inequality measured by the Gini coefficient decreases by 1.3 points when food away from home is included, a significant reduction. Finally, inclusion of food away from home results in a reclassification of households from poor to non-poor status and vice versa: 20 percent of the poor are different when the analysis includes consumption of food away from home. This effect is large enough that a standard poverty profile analysis results in significant differences between the poverty classification based on whether food away from home is included or not. The differences cover many dimensions, including demographics, education, and labor market characteristics. Taken together, the results indicate that a serious rethinking of how to deal with the consumption of food away from home in measuring well-being is urgently needed to properly estimate and understand poverty around the world.

Data Collection --- Food & Beverage Industry --- Food Consumption --- Industry --- Inequality --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poverty --- Poverty Lines --- Poverty Reduction --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Welfare Measurement

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The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the Arab Republic of Egypt's economy and its people in many ways. By combining micro-simulations and imputation techniques, this paper models early impacts of the pandemic on household income and the role of cash transfers from the Government of Egypt in supporting households and workers. As expected, and consistent with other evidence, the estimates show that the pandemic shock decreased labor incomes and increased income poverty in Egypt. It was estimated that in fiscal year 2020, average household income per capita contracted by about 1.7 percent, and income poverty was about 2.2 percentage points higher, compared to a non-COVID-19 scenario for the same year, using the international poverty line of $3.65 a day (2017 purchasing power parity). Labor income losses were widespread across the country, disproportionately affecting informal workers. The results also suggest that expanded social protection cash transfers and targeted cash assistance to Egypt's informal and tourism sectors played a substantial role in smoothing the initial labor income shock. In the absence of compensatory cash transfers, income poverty would have been 1.1 percentage points higher. The compensatory measures, in particular the cash transfer programs Takaful and Karama, preferentially protected rural households due to the programs' targeting rules. Thus, households in urban areas were significantly more likely to become income poor, compared to those in rural settings.

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Despite the obvious positive health impacts of tobacco taxation, an argument raised against it is that poor households bear the burden of the increased prices because of their higher share of spending on tobacco. This report includes estimates of the distributional impacts of price rises on cigarettes under various scenarios using the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2016/17. One contribution of this analysis is to quantify the impacts by allowing price elasticities to vary across consumption deciles. This shows that an increase in the price of cigarettes in Bangladesh has small consumption impacts and does not significantly change the poverty rate or consumption inequality. These findings stem from relatively even cigarette consumption patterns between less and more welloff households. These results hold even if one considers some small substitution through the use of bidis, which are largely consumed by the poor. The short-term consumption impacts are also negligible compared with the estimated gains because of savings in medical costs and the greater number of productive years of life.

Disease Control and Prevention --- Health Economics and Finance --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Inequality --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poverty --- Poverty Reduction --- Taxation and Subsidies --- Tobacco Use and Control

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Adequate investment in human capital development is critical for enabling Bangladesh to reach its goal of becoming an upper middle-income country. Bangladesh, currently a lower-middle country with an annual per capita gross national income (GNI) of USD 1,470 (WDI 2019), aims to attain upper-middle income status by 2021 and eliminate poverty by 2030. Recognizing the importance of investing in education for building its human capital base, the government of Bangladesh (GoB) has been allocating a large portion of the national budget to the education sector each year during the past two decades. Effective utilization and equitable distribution of allocated public spending is important for ensuring adequate progress in education outcomes. This report analyzes major spending and outcomes trends in the overall education sector in recent years, with a focus on primary and secondary education. Responding to the recommendation of the 2015 Bangladesh Public Expenditure Review Update for more analytical work on public spending in different sectors, including education, the current study analyzes the trends in major education expenditures, access to education, quality of education, and disparities in education outcomes in the past two decades. It also looks at the composition of education expenditure, consistency between budget allocations and actual expenditures, equity in education spending, and potential links between spending and key educational outcomes. Because of data limitations, this report focuses mainly on primary and secondary education. It is expected that this analysis will add to the literature on investments in the Bangladesh education sector and inform discussions on identifying policy priorities and making resource allocation decisions in the sector.

Education --- Education Finance --- Education For All --- Primary Education --- Public Sector Development --- Secondary Education --- Tertiary Education