World Bank Conference - The Pulse of Progress: Harnessing High-Frequency Survey Data for Development Research in the Polycrisis Era

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Overview

The Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), the World Bank’s flagship household survey program, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are co-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 have evolved to provide substantive insights on the socioeconomic impacts of large-scale health, economic and environmental shocks that have unfolded over the last 4+ years.]

They have also had a transformative impact on national statistical systems, complementing existing in-person surveys 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 LSMS—supported countries alone.

Program

CLICK HERE to access the conference program.

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. The selected papers have been organized into the thematically organized sessions on:

Resources

To encourage submissions using the LSMS-HFPS data, the LSMS has made available an open-access, harmonized dataset. The dataset can be accessed here and the underlying Stata syntax can be accessed here.

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 geovariables 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

The conference's organizing committee includes Philip Wollburg, Alemayehu Ambel, and Karenina Velandia, working under the direction of Talip Kilic. The following Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) team members also supported the review and selection of the conference papers: Sydney Gourlay, Adriana Paolantonio, Ivette Contreras, Akuffo Amankwah, Hai-Anh Dang, and Marco Tiberti.