Measuring welfare when it matters most: A Typology of Approaches for Real-time Monitoring

In recent years, the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice (GP) has increased its capacity to provide more timely information on welfare. This typology takes stock of the growing body of work on real-time welfare monitoring, bringing together existing resources and lessons learned in one place. It aims to offer an overarching roadmap to help teams navigate different approaches and identify the best fit for answering a specific question in a given context. The “best fit” approach may differ across settings depending on a country’s data ecosystem and implementation constraints. This typology systematizes the decision-making process by laying out the various advantages, disadvantages, underlying data requirements, and assumptions of different approaches. While primarily drawing the Poverty and Equity GP’s work, the typology aims to contextualize real-time monitoring within a broader body of research and towards recent innovations in the field.