The Poverty Podcast

Welcome to the fifth episode of the Poverty Podcast. Today we're joined by Miriam Muller, a social scientist in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice, and Javier Romero, an economist working in the Poverty and Equity Practice for Latin America and the Caribbean and the Gender Innovation Lab of the region, who discuss what we have learned so far about how COVID-19 has affected men and women differently across the different dimensions of gender equality.

On today’s episode, we're joined by Ana Maria Muñoz Boudet and Zeina Afif, from the Mind, Behavior, and Development team here at the World Bank. Ana Maria and Zeina will walk us through how the World Bank uses behavioral science in its projects, and how this area of science can support the Bank’s work by identifying factors that affect what people think and do. We will also talk about how the Bank is using behavioral science to fight vaccine hesitancy through social media.

Global trade will play a critical role in driving economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the flow of food, medical supplies, and vaccines, and contributing to poverty reduction. But policies must be in place to ensure that gains from trade are spread across regions, industries, and workers in developing countries.

This episode looks at the World Bank’s household monitoring dashboard, which was created to track the impacts of COVID-19 in developing countries. 

When the world was hit by the COVID crisis, the World Bank and partners started a big initiative of doing surveys by phone – while also making those numbers publicly available. This effort is ongoing and the goal is to do phone surveys in more than 100 countries.

On today’s episode we’ll be looking at extreme poverty around the globe through the lens of the Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report, produced by the World Bank every two years. This year, poverty economists faced an important challenge when tallying numbers, accomplishments and downfalls in the development scenario: COVID-19.