Mitigating Poverty: Global Estimates of the Impact of Income Support during the Pandemic

This paper reconstructs the full welfare distributions from household surveys of 160 countries, covering 96.5 percent of the global population, to estimate the pandemic-induced increases in global poverty and provide information on the potential short-term effects of income-support programmes on mitigating such increases. Crucially, the analysis performs a large-scale simulation by combining the welfare distributions with the database of social protection measures of Gentilini et al. (2021) and estimates such effects from 72 actual income-support programmes planned or implemented across 41 countries.