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Using a high-frequency mobile phone survey of food security conducted by the World Food Programme, this paper investigates how food assistance and access to food changed following the announcement of famine-like conditions in the Republic of Yemen. Among the mobile phone-using population, the share of households receiving food assistance more than doubled following the announcement. The increases were largely targeted at regions identified in the announcement as being closer to famine in the original announcement, and there was improvement in access to food in regions that received the most food assistance relative to the rest of the country. Although the survey misses struggling households that do not have access to a mobile phone and are potentially more at risk of famine, the results raise questions about the need for better quality data in food emergencies that are updated more regularly for better targeting of food assistance.

Agriculture --- Aid Delivery --- Conflict --- Development Economics --- Emergency Assistance --- Famine --- Food Aid --- Food Security --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Mobile Phones --- Poverty Reduction

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The paper delves into the implications of a failure to account for rental regulation in the measurement of households' welfare, poverty, and inequality when using household surveys. Exploiting previously unavailable data for the Egyptian case, the paper illustrates the long-lasting distortions in the rental market that the 1977 rental law has created. The paper finds evidence that earlier studies may have substantially underestimated households' welfare in urban areas and overestimated urban poverty. National poverty rates show smaller corrections, as poverty is mainly a rural phenomenon in the Arab Republic of Egypt. An appropriate measure of welfare also led to downward corrections in inequality in urban Egypt, while increasing the inequality across regions. These effects counterbalance each other and nationwide inequality estimates are affected only slightly.

Inequality --- Rental Regulation --- Welfare Measurement

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Issues of data availability and incomparability in the measurement of household consumption arise frequently when measuring poverty trends over time. Yet, understanding these trends is key to guide national and international policy makers in their poverty reduction efforts. This paper aims to estimate a long-run poverty trend for Nigeria, a country whose poverty trends are crucial for regional and global estimates. In 2020, the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics released the first official poverty estimates for Nigeria in almost a decade, calculated using the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey. Yet the official poverty estimates from the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey cannot technically be compared with those from the 2009/10 Harmonized Nigerian Living Standards Survey-the previous official household consumption survey-given key differences in the way household consumption was measured and concerns around data quality in the 2009/10 survey. To address this challenge, this paper uses two distinct methodologies to construct a poverty trend for Nigeria in the decade before the COVID-19 crisis. First, it uses sector-level gross domestic product growth rates combined with micro-data from the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards Survey to "backcast" poverty rates back to 2009. Second, it uses survey-to-survey imputation methods and data collected throughout the decade through the General Household Survey panel. Despite their very different foundations, these two approaches produce very similar results, suggesting that there was a small reduction in poverty at the beginning of the decade, followed by a period of stagnation or even a slight uptick in poverty following the 2016 economic recession. The paper estimates a poverty rate of between 42.2 and 46.3 percent in 2009, translating into a reduction in the poverty headcount rate of between 3 and 7 percentage points between 2009 and 2018/19.

Poverty

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In light of the recent microfinance crisis in South India, government-run institutions in general, and primary agricultural credit cooperatives in particular, may end up playing a larger role in the provision of financial services for the poor. Using survey data collected in 2007 from three districts in Andhra Pradesh, this paper assesses the performance of 72 primary agricultural credit cooperatives and finds lack of training among the management. In addition, primary agricultural credit cooperatives tend to be used as political instruments and, as a result, borrowers prioritize all debt obligations (microfinance institutions, informal lenders, et cetera) before repaying their primary agricultural credit cooperative loans. The authors suggest that if the performance of primary agricultural credit cooperatives does not improve, a larger government role in the supply of credit may undermine the culture of repayment.

Access to Finance --- Agricultural credit cooperatives --- Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress --- Banks & Banking Reform --- Debt Markets --- Debt obligations --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial Intermediation --- Financial services --- Microfinance institutions --- Private Sector Development --- Repayment

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Around the world, in both developed and developing countries, policy makers use a variety of tools to manage and accommodate urban growth and redevelopment. Government officials have three main concerns in terms of land policy: (i) accommodating urban expansion, (ii) providing infrastructure, and (iii) managing density. Together, the planning for infrastructure and urban expansion, land use, and density policies combine to shape the spatial structure of cities. This paper reviews global experience on using land based instruments to accommodate urban development and financing infrastructure. The review suggests that urban transformation is most efficient when land markets are fluid, particularly when they are grounded in strong institutions that (i) assign and protect property rights, (ii) enable independent valuation and public dissemination of land values across uses, and (iii) enable the judicial system to handle disputes that may arise in the process.

Conflict and Development --- Land transaction --- Land valuation --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Municipal Financial Management --- Public Sector Economics --- Public Sector Management and Reform --- Regional Governance --- Urban Development --- Urban Governance and Management --- Urbanization