ASPIRE is a joint project of the World Bank Social Protection and Jobs (SPJ) Global Practice.

ASPIRE builds on the work of several country and regional teams within the World Bank SPJ Global Practice, together with the World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice, the Development Economics Research Group, and the International Income Distribution Database (I2D2). All these colleagues have helped the ASPIRE team in obtaining the necessary data and welfare aggregates to build the database and have been critical in validating the indicators produced. An important acknowledgement goes also to the staff of over 100 governmental statistics offices that collected the primary household survey data.

By harmonizing survey data for 129 countries, ASPIRE aims to meet the increasing demand on comparable and up-to-date SPL data from policymakers, practitioners and other country stakeholders, World Bank staff, other development organizations, researchers and civil society.

In summary, ASPIRE indicators based on household surveys are useful for:

• Benchmarking SPL programs and systems performance in terms of overall coverage, benefit incidence, adequacy of benefits, impact on poverty and inequality, benefit-cost ratios as well as programs overlaps and spending. These indicators are provided by program type, by extreme poor, poor and non-poor, by quintiles of (before and after-transfer) welfare distribution, and by urban/rural geographical areas.
• Complementing administrative data on SPL programs and systems collected through countries’ Management Information Systems for a broader analysis.
• Providing a description of country SPL systems based on nationally representative household surveys (with related caveats) and on information directly collected from beneficiaries.

The ASPIRE database includes two types of indicators: performance and social expenditure.

Social Expenditure

This indicator refers to the total program expenditure including spending on benefits and on administrative costs. The indicator captures both the recurrent and capital program budget and is based on administrative program records. Program level expenditure is analyzed as a percent of GDP of the respective year and is aggregated by harmonized program categories (unconditional cash transfers, conditional cash transfers, social pensions, school feeding, in-kind transfers, fee waivers, public works, and other social assistance) of social assistance programs (expenditure for social insurance and labor market programs is not yet available).

Performance 

Performance indicators estimate the performance of social assistance, social insurance and labor market programs in 129 countries based on nationally representative household surveys. The indicators are disaggregated by SPL harmonized program category, by rural and urban geographical areas, by quintile of the pre- and post-transfer welfare distribution, and by those living below PPP $2.15 a day (extreme poor). They are grouped according to the following topics:

• Coverage
  • Coverage
  • Program duplication and overlaps
• Targeting accuracy
  • Benefit incidence
  • Beneficiary incidence
• Benefit level
  • Average per capita transfer (daily $PPP)
  • Adequacy of benefits
• Impacts and efficiency
  • Poverty head count reduction
  • Poverty gap reduction
  • Inequality reduction
  • Benefit-cost ratio

ASPIRE performance indicators cover 518 nationally representative household surveys in 129 countries, mostly in the developing world, from 1998 to 2021.

ASPIRE expenditure indicators are available for 113 countries, using administrative data.

ASPIRE performance indicators are generally based on national representative household surveys (except for Argentina where the survey is only urban representative) including household income expenditure/budget surveys, Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS), Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICs), Surveys on Income and Living Conditions (SILCs), and Welfare Monitoring Surveys. Efforts are made to ensure that welfare aggregates (either income or consumption per capita) used to rank households are those harmonized by World Bank regional poverty teams and are up-to-date.

ASPIRE expenditure indicators are based on program administrative records from primary and secondary sources: official government reports and the official website; data provided directly by government officials through country dialogue with the World Bank; published World Bank country reports; and other international databases (from the Asian Development Bank, Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations, and World Food Programme, HelpAge). When official program-level administrative data are not available, data have been collected and compiled by the World Bank local consultants working closely with government agencies implementing social assistance programs.

There is no other source of similar indicators for the developing world:

• With the same country coverage
• Archived and accessible
• Focused on cutting-edge techniques to assess program performance (ADePT Social Protection)