Gero Carletto

World Bank · Development Data Group

Survey‐to‐survey imputation has been increasingly employed to address data gaps for poverty measurement in poorer countries. We refine existing imputation models, using 14 multi‐topic household surveys conducted over the past decade in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Vietnam. We find that adding household utility expenditures to a basic im...

Nationally representative household surveys are a potential data source that could shed light on the climate–migration nexus. However, they are rarely designed specifically to measure or study migration and often lack the necessary features to identify connections with climate change. This paper offers a critical reflection on current challenges fa...

Despite its low middle-income status, Vietnam has been widely praised for its success in the fight against early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a low mortality rate of around 100 deaths out of a population of less than 100 million by the end of 2020. We add to the small literature on COVID-19 effects on the labor market for poorer countries b...

This paper presents an analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the operations of National Statistical Offices (NSOs), how NSOs responded and adjusted to the disruptions, and how they are transitioning to a post-pandemic equilibrium. The paper uses four rounds of the Global COVID-19 survey of NSOs conducted by The World Bank and the United Na...

Household surveys are a vital component of national statistical systems. They are the basis for official statistics on social and economic phenomena and are key to tracking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, despite their importance, household surveys face various challenges, including problems with data quality, ti...

Migration has been demonstrated by various studies to be closely linked to improvements in individual- and household-level outcomes. In this paper, rather than examining the effects of migration, we explore whether an economic shock in United States affected migrant households in rural Guatemala. Treating the Great Recession as a natural experiment...

The agricultural sector is undergoing a period of rapid transformation, driven by the powerful and interconnected impacts of climate change, demographic transitions and uneven economic growth around the world. For governments and the international community to navigate this period of upheaval to protect vulnerable populations and ensure positive so...

This paper uses a large database of surveys of household incomes to characterize income underreporting in household surveys in low- and middle-income countries. The objective is to document (a) the extent of this underreporting, and (b) whether and how it varies systematically with respondent, household, income, and survey design features. Drawing...

Advances in agricultural data production provide ever-increasing opportunities for pushing the research frontier in agricultural economics and designing better agricultural policy. As new technologies present opportunities to create new and integrated data sources, researchers face tradeoffs in survey design that may reduce measurement error or inc...

Household surveys, a pivotal component of every country's national statistical system, continue to be criticized and praised in equal manner. While recognizing their limitations, it is clear that certain types of data must continue to be collected through household surveys, preferably in an integrated manner with other data sources. This is particu...

Questions that often come up in contexts where household consumption data are unavailable or missing include: what are the best existing methods to obtain poverty estimates at a single snapshot in time? and over time? and what are the best available methods to study poverty dynamics? A variety of different techniques have been developed to tackle t...

Panel data play an important role in producing insights into households' welfare dynamics and economic transformation processes. Yet, such data are not readily available for a number of countries, particularly developing countries, because they require considerable financial and technical resources. We offer a review of the current panel data situa...

We report results of an experiment designed to assess whether the payment of contingent incentives to respondents in Karnataka, India, impacts the quality of survey data. Of 2276 households sampled at the city block level, 934 were randomly assigned to receive a small one-time payment at the time of the survey, whereas the remaining households did...

This introductory paper presents the results of an international multi-disciplinary research project on the measurement of food consumption in national household surveys. Food consumption data from household surveys are possibly the single most important source of information on poverty, food security, and nutrition outcomes at national, sub-nation...

Soil is a key input in agricultural production and analysis. This guidebook offers practical guidance for integrating spectral soil analysis into household survey operations, particularly in low-income, smallholder farmer contexts. It is geared toward survey practitioners and includes guidance on what to consider in evaluating competing methods for...

This study targets the empirical space between cross-country analyses exploring links between income and nutrition without insights on micro-level determinants, and relevant microeconomic studies hindered by small sample size and/or incomplete data. We use the rural samples of the three waves of the Uganda National Panel Survey, and estimate panel...

Land area is essential to analyses undertaken by agricultural economists. While handheld GPS-based area measurement has become a practical alternative to farmers’ error-prone area assessments in household surveys across the developing world, non-ignorable shares of GPS-based area measures are often missing in public datasets. Using nationally-repre...

The transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture is key for economic growth. But what are the consequences for nutritional outcomes? The evidence to date has been scant and inconclusive. This study contributes to the debate by revisiting two prevailing wisdoms: (a) market participation by African smallholders remains low; and (b) the impac...

Global, national and local policies and programmes for agricultural development are recurrently justified based on their alleged role in improving food and nutrition security. However, strikingly little evidence is available to prove that a direct, household-level link between agricultural production and improved nutrition exists. The objective of...

In rural societies land is a major measure of wealth, a critical input in agricultural production, and a key variable for assessing agricultural performance and productivity. In the absence of cadastral information to refer to, measures of land plots have historically been taken with one of two approaches: traversing (very precise, but cumbersome),...

This special issue contributes to the literature on gender differences in sub-Saharan African agriculture primarily by using new and innovative micro-data. The first six articles have a strong focus on understanding the extent and drivers of gender differences in land productivity and use data from nationally representative household surveys that a...

Agricultural development is an essential engine of growth and poverty reduction, yet agricultural data suffer from poor quality and narrow sectoral focus. There are several reasons for this: (1) difficult-to-measure smallholder agriculture is prevalent in poor countries; (2) agricultural data are collected with little coordination across sectors; a...

Development goals and poverty-reduction policies are often focused on raising agricultural productivity and dependent on farm household level data. Historically, household surveys commonly employed self-reported land area measurements for cost-effectiveness and convenience. However, as we illustrate here, these self-reported estimates may measure l...

As countries in the Western Balkans proceed on the path to accession to the European Union, they need to strengthen their statistical tools for measuring poverty and social inclusion and achieve compliance with the statistical chapter of the Acquis Communautaire. Over the last two decades, significant progress has been made to establish regular pro...

A variety of indicators are currently used for food security analysis, monitoring, and programming, and most agencies have their preferred variant on methods of data collection, aggregation, and analysis. This lack of consensus is reflected in an inefficient multiplicity of survey instruments collecting information on various dimensions of food and...

This paper examines the role of migration in affecting the labour market opportunities of male and female household members left behind. We address this question by analyzing the impact of international migration flows from Albania, where migration is a massive and male-dominated phenomenon. We find that the labour supply of men and women responds...

The constrained evidence base of food and nutrition policy-making compromises nutrition programs. Nutrition policy-making must do better than relying exclusively on Food and Agriculture Organization Food Balance Sheets. The strategy of relying on observed-weighed food record or 24-hour recall surveys has not proven practical either; they remain few...

Albania's radical farmland distribution is credited with averting an economic crisis and social unrest during the transition. But many believe it led to a holding structure too fragmented to be efficient, and that public efforts to consolidate plots are needed to lay the foundation for greater rural productivity. This paper uses farm-level data fro...

This paper revisits the role of land measurement error in the inverse farm size and productivity relationship. By making use of data from a nationally representative household survey from Uganda, in which self-reported land size information is complemented by plot measurements collected using Global Position System devices, the authors reject the h...

This article documents the long-term welfare effects of household nontraditional agricultural export (NTX) adoption. We use a panel dataset that spans the period 1985–2005, and employ difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the long-term impact of nontraditional agricultural export adoption on changes in household consumption status and...

The sluggish supply response in most developing countries to the apparently favourable agricultural market situation of the past few years can be explained by the limited ability of price incentives to bring about an increase in production and marketed surplus in the presence of binding non-price constraints. This article characterises farm househo...

Although good and timely information on agricultural production is critical for policy-decisions, the quality of underlying data is often low and improving data quality could have a highpayoff. This paper uses data from a production diary, administered concurrently with a standard household survey in Uganda to analyze the nature and incidence of re...

Despite the importance of agriculture to economic development, and a vast accompanying literature on the subject, little research has been done on the quality of the underlying data. Due to survey logistics, agricultural data are usually collected by asking respondents to recall the details of events occurring during past agricultural seasons that...

This paper examines the relationship between migration and child growth in the rural highlands of Guatemala, a region with substantial international migration outflows, significant remittance inflows, and some of the highest rates of child undernutrition in the world. Using cross-sectional survey data, a double-difference approach based on child gr...

Migration has become a key component in the livelihood strategies of an increasing number of households across the developing world and remittances have expanded dramatically in the last decade. This has come at a time when an increased emphasis has been placed on reducing malnutrition to achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets. While thi...

Despite the recent sustained economic growth, child undernutrition remains widespread in Mozambique, a country still exhibiting one of the highest undernutrition rates in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper provides a nutrition security profile based primarily on the latest available data from the 2008/09 Mozambique Household Budget Survey. Using child...

This article examines the dynamics and causes of the shift in the gender composition of migration, and more particularly, in women's access to migration opportunities and decision-making. Our analysis focuses on Albania, a natural laboratory for studying international migration where out-migration was essentially nonexistent from the end of World W...

Summary This paper uses a newly constructed cross-country database composed of comparable income aggregates to examine the full range of income generating activities carried out by rural households. The analysis paints a clear picture of multiple activities across rural space in countries on all four continents, though less so in the included Afric...

The increasing volume of remittances and public transfers in rural areas of the developing world has raised hopes that these inflows may serve as an effective mechanism for reducing poverty in the long term by facilitating investments and raising productivity, particularly in agriculture where market failures are most manifest. The seven papers in...

Since 1990, migration flows from Albania have been massive, relative to the size of the country and its population, but they have also fluctuated over time. In the first section of the paper various descriptive trends are presented, mainly in graphical form, and discussed. The data come from the 2005 Albanian Living Standards Measurement Survey, an...

Summary This paper examines the links between the assets and the economic activities of rural households in developing countries to provide insight into how the promotion of certain key assets--particularly education, land, and infrastructure--influences the economic choices of these households. Nationally representative data from 15 countries whic...

This paper assesses the current rural development practice against the main trends in recent rural development thinking, based on evidence from four country case studies. While much progress has been made in understanding the need to look beyond only agriculture for the promotion of productive activities in rural areas, and the “institutional vacuu...

This study uses data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study survey to assess the impact of past migration experience of Albanian households on non-farm business ownership through instrumental variables regression techniques. Considering the differences in earning potentials and opportunities for skill acquisition in different dest...

Cet article se penche sur les impacts de la migration sur les décisions de production agricole des ménages, y compris par rapport à l'attribution des tâches, la diversification des récoltes, ainsi que les revenus domestiques agricoles et totaux, en utilisant des données d'une enquête auprès de ménages, en Albanie. Les résultats indiquent que la mig...

Since the late 1970s dramatic economic changes have taken place in the agricultural sector in the highlands of Guatemala. The introduction of new export crops, such as snow peas, broccoli, and miniature vegetables, has led to yet another agro-export boom. Unlike earlier booms, however, this one has included all but the smallest farmers. The high ra...

This study uses the 2005 Albanian Living Standards Measurement Study Survey and estimates the impact of international migration experience on the occupational mobility of return migrants vis-a-vis working-age Albanian residents that never migrated. Controlling for the non-random nature of international migration and return, the results show that pa...

Using data from the 2005 Albania Living Standards Measurement Study (ALSMS05) survey, this article analyzes the overall impact of household nonfarm income-generating activities (RIGA) on agricultural expenditures as well as technical efficiency of rural farm households. We also differentiate the impact for subsistence and commercial farmers, who ar...

This study documents the long-term welfare effects of household non-traditional agricultural export (NTX) adoption. The analysis uses a unique panel dataset, which spans the period 1985-2005, and employs difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the long-term impact of non-traditional agricultural export adoption on changes in household c...

This paper investigates the impact of international migration on technical efficiency, resource allocation and income from agricultural production of family farming in Albania. The results suggest that migration is used by rural households as a pathway out of agriculture: migration is negatively associated with both labour and non-labour input allo...