prosperity (defined as a sustainable increase in the income and well-being of the bottom 40 percent of the population) in every country. Household surveys are key to monitoring the progress towards the Twin Goals, and obtaining socioeconomic, behavioral, multi-sectoral information to deepen the understanding of income poverty and inequality (Deaton, 1997, 2016). As aptly put by Deaton (2016:1222), “[t]he documentation of how people live, how much they spend, and on what, has long been used as a political tool, to make visible the living conditions of the poor to those in power, to shock, and to agitate for reform... Today’s household surveys typically collect information on household incomes and/or (often detailed) expenditures, as well as demographic, geographical, and other characteristics of household members. Their official purpose is often to collect weights for consumer price indexes, but they are also used to calculate national and global estimates of poverty and inequality.” International poverty estimates computed by the World Bank rely on household surveys from more than 130 developing countries (World Bank, 2016). Frequent, inter-temporally comparable household surveys are critical for measuring and monitoring shared prosperity (Narayan, et al. 2013; World Bank, 2015a; Atamanov et al. 2016).

Improvements over the past two decades notwithstanding, challenges in household survey data availability for monitoring poverty and shared prosperity remain substantial. During the 10 year period between 2002 and 2011, Serajuddin et al. (2015) document that 57 countries have zero or only one poverty estimate. This implies that in over a third of the world’s developing or middle income countries, there is no meaningful way of monitoring poverty or shared prosperity for that period. Out of 35 countries that have two poverty estimates over the ten-year period, the poverty estimates were more than five years apart for 20 countries, resulting in poverty monitoring efforts being dated. Thus, among the 155 countries for which the World Bank monitors poverty data, a total of 77 countries faced challenges in producing timely or any poverty estimates during the period of 2002-2011. Serajuddin et al. (2015) refer to such lack of poverty data as “data deprivation.” On October 15, 2015, WBG President Jim Yong Kim announced the WBG’s commitment to address this form of data deprivation by supporting the 78 poorest countries<sup>5</sup> to collect the household survey data needed to estimate poverty and shared prosperity every three years between 2016 and 2030:

> 5 The 78 poorest countries are those with IDA or Blend (i.e. IDA/IBRD) lending status that are eligible for World Bank grants and concessional financing, inclusive of India. The list is available at: <u>http://ida.worldbank.org/about/borrowing-countries. Although India graduated from IDA in Fiscal Year (FY) 2014,</u> the country will receive <mark>transitional support on an exceptional basis through the IDA17 period (FY2015 through FY2017).</mark> While the number of countries identified as data deprived by Serajuddin et al. (2015) is coincidentally close to the number of countries in which the World Bank committed to support data production, their compositions are somewhat different. The former identifies countries without sufficient number of data points to effectively monitor poverty, regardless of income status, and it includes some upper middle income countries. See Section 2 for more details.

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