The People Research Program in the World Bank's Development Research Group conducts research across a wide range of topics that broadly covers issues related to improving the wellbeing of people, particularly less well-off individuals, with the aim of enhancing sustainable, upward economic and social mobility. Some examples of topics covered by this team include early childhood development, education/skills, health, poverty, inequality, labor, and aging. The research agenda also focuses on related cross-cutting aspects such as gender, service delivery design, social protection, and public finance. The program includes methodological research on survey design and methods, and adaptive sampling techniques; as well as the use of improved data and existing data sources to better inform and assess the effectiveness of specific policies in enhancing human development and reducing poverty and inequality.
Development succeeds when people are not just beneficiaries, but partners in shaping change. Yet too often, policies are designed and evaluated from the top down. Drawing on two decades of field research and collaboration with governments, communities, and researchers, World Bank Lead Economist Vijayendra Rao discusses what it means to make policy for and with people. This lecture also marks Dr. Rao’s farewell as a member of the World Bank’s staff, concluding more than 25 years of research and collaboration within the Development Research Group.
In this blog, Anja Sautmann, Senior Economist in the Development Research Group, and Mark Dean, Professor at Columbia University, outline how subsidising healthcare for children in Mali substantially increased necessary care-seeking while generating only minimal unnecessary use. A randomized trial found that families receiving subsidies were nearly three times more likely to seek care when needed. While some overuse occurred, underuse remains the bigger challenge: many serious illnesses still go untreated. The findings highlight cost as a key barrier and call for removing user fees to improve child health.
The African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), the University of Ghana-Legon, and the World Bank announce a competitive call for papers and participation in a two-day policy research workshop to be held on November 11-12, 2025, on the campus of the University of Ghana-Legon. This event promises to be a vibrant forum for discussing the latest challenges, groundbreaking evidence, and innovative solutions that are shaping the future of women's roles in the African economy to foster economic development.
The Venezuelan Refugee Panel Study (VenRePS) follows the same migrant households over time to understand how legal status shapes lives. Focused on Colombia’s Permiso Especial de Permanencia (PEP), the study tracked 2,232 Venezuelan households between 2020-21. The study shows how regularization impacts economic stability, social integration, political participation, and well-being, offering rare long-term evidence on displacement. Explore the website to see how these insights can help policymakers, organizations, and governments to design more effective migration policies.
The World Bank and George Washington University are pleased to announce the inaugural AI & The Future of Human Capital in the Global South Symposium scheduled for Monday September 29th, 2025, in Washington, DC. This in-person event will bring together experts across disciplines to explore how AI-driven innovations can help address critical human development challenges in low- and middle-income countries.
Over 1,000 senior Cambodian officials have completed the Leadership and Innovation Program, transforming how reforms are led across government. Rooted in Building State Capability by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock, the program equips leaders with practical tools like adaptive leadership, communication, conflict management, Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), and cross-sector collaboration. Designed locally with World Bank support, now the program is expanding beyond senior officials. The next phase will include school principals and health facility directors, broadening its impact on education and healthcare delivery.
Sandra Rozo, Senior Economist at the Poverty, Inequality, and Human Development team at DECRG, received the 2024 Juan Luis Londoño de la Cuesta Award for her impactful research on forced migration in Colombia and the broader region. Her work has significantly advanced the understanding of migration’s social, economic, and political effects, influencing public policy design and implementation. For an overview of her research on this topic, read Sandra’s recently published VoxDevLit on Refugees and Other Forcibly Displaced Populations.
In this keynote presentation, Vijayendra Rao talks about "reflexive policymaking", which argues that local control should be given to local issues. Additionally, Rao shares that this paradigm of policymaking emphasizes that people who are impacted by policy decisions should be centrally involved in forming the policies that affect their rights. This presentation focuses on four central themes: 1) deliberation, 2) democratizing data, 3) incentivizing politicians, and 4) the added value of local democracy.
While the world appears to have transitioned out of the COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on society and health systems has been profound. In this talk, World Bank Lead Economist Damien de Walque highlights and discusses some of the lessons learned through this crisis and the response to it. Stressing how beneficial the investments in health—including vaccination—have been during the pandemic, he also places the disruption brought by COVID-19 in perspective with the current evolving burden of diseases in low- and middle-income countries.
It is estimated that by early 2021, there were more than 110 million displaced people, of whom 41% are children under the age of 18. One of the main obstacles to progress in this field is the lack of longitudinal data and information on the human development status of children. The Longitudinal Survey of Forced Migrant Children (VenRePs-Kids) was developed to contribute in this direction.
Oyebola Okunogbe recently won the Best Paper Award from the American Economic Association for her paper “Technology, Taxation, and Corruption” alongside co-author Victor Pouliquen. They use experimental variation to examine the impact of electronic tax filing (to replace in-person submission to tax officials) using data from Tajikistan firms. The pair of researchers find that e-filing reduces the time firms spend on taxes by 40 percent. Further, among firms previously more likely to evade, e-filing doubles taxes paid.
Considering the three main dimensions of social protection (social assistance, social insurance, and labor market access) this literature review generates an index for overall refugee social protection access in 30 countries. The 30 host countries in the study account for 55% of the world’s inflow of refugees, Palestinian refugees, and other people in need of international help as of 2022. This book chapter appendix is from the forthcoming Handbook of Social Protection.
Forced displacement has reached unprecedented levels, with over 120 million individuals displaced globally as of 2024 due to conflict, violence, climate change, and human rights violations. This review underscores the importance of transitioning from humanitarian aid to self-reliance models, closing policy implementation gaps, and tailoring interventions to local contexts.
Governments across the world make thousands of personnel management decisions, procure millions of goods and services, and execute billions of processes each day. Responding effectively and with professional integrity to public administration’s many challenges requires recognizing that access to more and better quantitative data is necessary, but insufficient. This chapter, from The Government Analytics Handbook, focuses on four risks which can come from an overreliance on quantitative data.
This chapter, co-authored by Michael Woolcock, appears in the book Oxford Handbook of Social Program Design and Implementation Evaluation. The book creates a comprehensive and actionable toolbox of evaluation methodologies that can be used to examine social programs throughout their life cycle.
Mobility is an integral part of the development process. It is a mechanism for reallocating labor across economic sectors and geographical areas. It enables adaptation to shocks, stresses, and imbalances. Cross-border mobility inevitably comes with economic and social consequences for those who move, their communities of origin, and their destinations. The World Development Report (WDR) is taking a fresh look at these issues. It aims to shift from a narrow focus on labor markets for migrants and legal protection for refugees to a more holistic perspective — one that recognizes the humanity of migrants and the complexity of the societies of origin and destination.
All development is about people: the transformative process to equip, link, and enable groups of people to drive change and create something new to benefit society. Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century seeks to advance the concept of social sustainability and sharpen its analytical foundations. By identifying interventions that work to promote the components of social sustainability and highlighting the evidence of their links to key development outcomes, this book provides a foundation for using social sustainability to help address the many challenges of our time.
Improving Effective Coverage in Health: Do Financial Incentives Work? examines one specific policy approach to improving effective coverage: financial incentives in the form of performance-based financing (PBF), a package reform that typically includes performance pay to frontline health workers as well as facility autonomy, transparency, and community engagement.
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