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The Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), the World Bank’s flagship household survey program, is organizing a conference, The Pulse of Progress: Harnessing High-Frequency Survey Data for Development Research in the Polycrisis Era, which will take place on December 17-18, 2024, at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
This two-day conference will celebrate four years of the LSMS conducting longitudinal High-Frequency Phone Surveys (HFPS) in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Initially launched to address data and knowledge gaps related to the COVID-19 pandemic, these surveys developed to facilitate routine monitoring of large-scale events, such as health emergencies or extreme weather occurrences, and their socioeconomic impacts on communities.
They have had a transformative impact on national statistical and data systems, complementing existing in-person survey infrastructure with high-frequency data collection on policy-relevant topics. To date, more than 100 survey rounds and 200,000 interviews have been completed across the six countries.
The Pulse of Progress: Harnessing High-Frequency Survey Data for Development Research in the Polycrisis Era conference aims to showcase applied research that leverages high-frequency phone survey data, including but not limited to the LSMS-HFPS, as the primary data source for addressing substantive questions in development economics and related fields.
Submissions, papers, topics and data
In April 2024, we launched a Call for Proposals inviting researchers, particularly those at the beginning of their careers, to submit abstracts covering a wide range of topics, such as:
| Resilience and shocks | Food security |
| Health | Inequality, poverty and wellbeing |
| Education | Jobs and labor |
| Climate change | Agriculture |
| Conflict and fragility | Gender |
The authors of the abstracts selected by an internal committee submitted their full papers by November 8, and those will be presented at the conference, on December 17-18, 2024.
Submissions using the LSMS-HFPS data were particularly encouraged, and with that objective, an open-access, harmonized dataset was created. It is still available for consultation here (dataset) and here (stata syntax).
The dataset covers all LSMS-HFPS survey rounds and allows linkages at the household and individual levels over time. It can be integrated with the LSMS-Integrated Survey on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) series of nationally representative face-to-face household surveys in the same countries, which include geo-variables and cluster locations.
The scope of data can be explored on the LSMS webpage, while the raw LSMS-HFPS and LSMS-ISA data is available on the World Bank Microdata Library.
Contact: LSMS_HFPS@worldbank.org