Methods & Measurement

The data ecosystem is flawed. Fixing it requires hard work to overcome many barriers. Data Basis has done exactly that to build a public good that puts data in people’s hands.

Tracking rural markets using satellite imagery offers a new way to monitor economic conditions in remote, data-scarce regions – as demonstrated by a new research paper and online dashboard.

The $1-a-day poverty line has long understated the true scale of global poverty. New research proposes a $21.50-a-day upper bound that would shift the focus of development policy towards broad-based economic growth.

Rafe Meager on aggregating evidence in the social sciences, the research process, and how to read results.

When official statistics are unavailable or unreliable, researchers can use a range of forensic methods – such as satellite imagery, mirror trade data, price monitoring, refugee surveys, humanitarian data, and text mining – to extract credible econom...

We develop a new method to analyse open-ended qualitative interviews with large samples, and apply it to interviews with Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi hosts on parent’s aspirations for children, revealing dimensions of aspiration that standard su...

The leading global early warning system for acute food insecurity systematically underestimates the scale of crisis-level hunger, missing around one in five people affected. As a result, global assessments significantly understate the scope of global...

Global poverty trends look radically different depending on the poverty line used. A new measure that doesn’t depend on ‘lines’ – the average time needed to earn a dollar – shows that global poverty has fallen sharply, by about 55% since 1990. This w...

Africa’s total public debt has risen more than fourfold since the early 2000s, but just as important as the increase in debt volumes is the shift in structure. This column uses a new open-access dataset covering more than 50,000 loans and securities ...