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COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 37 
 

 

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global 

Poverty: An Interview with Michael Woolcock, 

Lead Social Scientist at the World Bank 

 

Michael Woolcock 
 

Interviewed by Roland Hoksbergen 

 

 
On January 19, 2021 the Accord Research Alliance (ARA) teamed up with us at Christian Relief, 

Development, and Advocacy to interview Michael Woolcock about the recent World Bank 

Publication, Reversals of Fortune: Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020, that Dr. Woolcock co-

directed. The interview was broadcast as a webinar and is presented here in print. 

 

Dr. Michael Woolcock grew up in Australia and came to the United States for graduate education in 

sociology at Brown University. Upon graduation in 1998, he took a position at the World Bank, and 

is now Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank's Development Research Group. For fifteen of the 

last twenty-one years he has also been a (part-time) Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University's 

Kennedy School of Government.  

 

His current research focuses on strategies for enhancing state capability for implementation, on 

crafting more effective interaction between informal and formal justice systems, and on using mixed 

methods to assess the effectiveness of "complex" development interventions. Over the past twenty-

three years he has authored over a hundred journal articles and book chapters, and co-authored or 

co-edited ten books, on topics ranging from social capital, history, and law to state capability, popular 

culture, and research methods. In 2015-17 he helped establish the World Bank’s first Global 

Knowledge and Research Hub. He has contributed to several of the World Bank’s major reports, 

including the one discussed in this interview, Reversals of Fortune: Poverty and Shared Prosperity 

2020, which he co-directed with Samuel Freije-Rodriguez. 

 

Michael was also a speaker at the 2019 Accord Network Summit, a guest on an earlier ARA podcast, 

and currently serves on the editorial board of the Accord Network journal, Christian Relief, 

Development, and Advocacy, for which Roland Hoksbergen is the chief editor. 

 

 
 

RH: Michael, thank you so much for 

being with us today. How did you get from 

Australia to the World Bank? What parts of 

that journey would you like to tell us about? 

 

MW: First of all, let me thank you, Roland, and 

all your colleagues, and everyone else who’s listening 

today. It is an honor and privilege to discuss this report.  

 

To answer your question: in my mid-twenties, like 

a lot of people at that time of their lives, I was wondering 

what God wanted me to do with my life. I considered 

my skill set, which seemed fairly modest, but I offered 

it up. My favorite parable is the one about the loaves 

and the fishes. That sense of offering up what little you 

have, which often feels so vastly inadequate to the 

nature and scale of the challenge at hand, is an ever-

present reality for me… But somehow, in ways we never 

understand, one’s offering gets multiplied and does 

what it is supposed to do, in abundance.  

So I made that step. What I thought was the biggest 

problem in the world was that so many people were just 

needlessly dying, due to the absence of food, the 

absence of justice, the absence of resources and 

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Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 38 
 

opportunities. At that time – in the eighties and nineties, 

as the Cold War ended – it was still an open question 

as to whether and how those kinds of opportunities and 

resources could be extended to everyone. But if they 

could, I wanted to be a part of that process and to offer 

up my little bit as best I could.  

I knew enough sociology at that time to know that 

networks are everything, and that who you know counts 

for an awful lot, so I wanted to become part of the 

networks in which key ideas and decisions pertaining to 

international development were being formulated and 

debated. Over time, I felt a particular call to work at a 

pretty high level. Not everyone is called to do that, and 

no hierarchy or superiority is implied – I just offered up 

what I could and sought to connect it into the networks 

I was slowing starting to understand and be part of. If I 

was going to make the sacrifice of leaving a happy life 

and family situation in Australia to spend probably the 

rest of my days doing this, then I wanted to do it at a 

high level. I knew I had to get a good graduate 

education and be part of the social networks of 

decision-making that are part of the process. So I chose 

to go to Brown University to study sociology, because 

that was my discipline, and I wanted to study under this 

great social theorist, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, who could 

mentor me in the particular thing that I wanted to think 

I was okay at.  

I also needed to be part of this broader network of 

development researchers and policy advisors, so I went 

to Brown because it was part of the Ivy League, which 

enabled me to spend my third year of graduate school 

in the Department of Economics at Harvard. It was this 

combination of sociological grounding and a familiarity 

with economics and economists (not necessarily the 

same thing!) that turned out to be ideal preparation for 

the position I was offered at the World Bank. By a 

whole series of circumstances and steps that I will not 

describe here, in the mid-1990s the World Bank, under 

the leadership of then-president James Wolfensohn, 

established a Social Development department. There 

had been social development staff working on social 

development issues for many years at the Bank, but 

they had never had a dedicated institutional space, and 

thus a collective voice. They did not have a formal place 

in the organizational chart, and as any student of 

bureaucracy knows, unless you are in the chart, you 

effectively do not exist. Having created the Social 

Development department, however, it seemed no self-

respecting economist in the Research Group wanted to 

serve on the Social Development board, so they 

opened up a position to a non-economist for the first 

and only time; I was lucky enough to secure the spot. 

Actually, they gave the job to someone they had 

advertised it for – someone with fifteen years of 

research experience – but they gave me a job anyway by 

creating an additional slot for me. I will be eternally 

grateful to the people who had the foresight, or the 

courage and the wherewithal, to do that. Soon after I 

started at the Bank, I got an opportunity to teach part-

time at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government – so 

that combination of doing, thinking, and researching 

inside the World Bank, but also teaching a class most 

years at the Kennedy School, is what I have done (apart 

from four years living in the UK, on two separate 

occasions) for the last twenty-three years. 

 

RH: One of today’s listeners acknowledges your 

involvement in research and report-writing, but 

wonders what else the World Bank does. 

 

MW: Actually, report writing is a very small part of what 

the Bank does. Most of the power, influence, and 

politics of the World Bank comes from its lending and 

grant giving. There are two different types of financial 

assistance we provide. All but the poorest (and most 

‘fragile’) countries of the world (there are about 36 of 

them) are eligible to receive loans from the World 

Bank to serve their particular development priorities. 

For the very poorest/most ‘fragile’ countries, the World 

Bank provides grants through one of its branches called 

the International Development Association (IDA). 

Together, loans and grants add up to billions and 

billions of dollars each year. After all, we are a bank, 

and we lend money, and that is where most of our good 

work happens. But precisely because there are billions 

of dollars in play, it is also where lots of crazy stuff 

happens and where opportunities for malfeasance arise, 

such as when working with openly corrupt 

governments. Ethical questions abound... But the 

underlying premise of multilateral institutions is that 

development is made possible, especially during global 

crises such as the present moment, by having globally-

supported financial institutions in place for providing 

countries, especially the poorest countries whose public 

health budgets are being decimated, with quick access 

to resources, expertise and forgiveness for existing 

forms of debt. All that is really the bread and butter of 

the World Bank. What I do for a living is deep in the 

outfield of what most people at the Bank do most of the 

time. I am not modally representative in any way of 

what World Bank staff actually do! But I just wake every 

day, like all of you, and offer up what I have. That has 

to be enough, because that is what we are called to do. 

 

RH: What is it like working as a person of faith at the 

World Bank?  You’ve already noted that you see it as a 

calling. But what is it like day to day, week to week? 

How do you live out your faith while working at the 

Bank? 

 

MW: It has been a pleasant surprise, or maybe not 

really a surprise, to discover that in a global 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 39 
 

organization, where there are people from literally 

everywhere, a surprising number chose to work there 

for faith-based reasons that are versions of what I just 

described about mine. I have the pleasure of working 

with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, 

Mormons, everyone. But there is a commonality of 

shared intention that I think holds true across all the 

major world religions, which is that they exist, in part 

and on a good day, to help those who are the least 

privileged, those with the least access to key services, 

who are the least able to defend their rights, contribute 

to life of their community, and to realize their 

aspirations. The World Bank’s mission, and certainly 

the mission of most of its staff members, is consistent 

with these ideals; what was pleasantly surprising was 

learning how many of my colleagues come at this from 

their own religious (or secular) standpoint as an explicit 

matter of principle, and then try to live it out. I love 

being part of that collective effort; at one level you are 

trying to integrate yourself with people who come at this 

from very different theological perspectives, but 

ultimately the commonality that you share is vastly more 

important than whatever differences there might be. 

We all think we are using the gifts God has given us – 

our talents, our resources, our access, and the 

connections we have – but we are doing that in the 

service of our counterparts, together seeking to make 

the world a slightly better place than it would be 

otherwise.  

Yes, there is a whole lot of politics and shenanigans 

that go along with trying to live out your faith on a day-

to-day basis, but that is the case whether you work at the 

Bank or at the UN or anywhere else. And yet there are 

also moments of incredible grace for me, such as when 

you’re in a big room with hundreds and sometimes 

thousands of people from everywhere in the world. I 

think God is looking around at everyone in that room 

and just smiling and hugging everyone, thinking “This 

is the world; these are my people, this is what we 

created.” And on a good day, when we all get on 

together like that, it is just magical.  

Of course, such moments don’t happen all the 

time, and others use those same social differences to 

divide the world, but I do my work at the World Bank 

for similar reasons that everyone else from a faith 

tradition does it. There does not have to be any 

contradiction to the broader mission of the 

organization, because the mission of the organization 

and of the Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report is to 

document and respond to those who get left behind, 

and to redress the deep and unequal processes that 

create and sustain them. The importance of taking on 

that challenge is a common Christian theme, but also a 

common Muslim theme, Hindu theme, Buddhist 

theme, Jewish theme, and almost everyone else’s 

theme. 

RH: Let’s move on to the report. Before we get into the 

details, please talk about the background of the report. 

When was the first one written, how often is it updated? 

What is the purpose of the report? And have there 

been major changes over time? 

 

MW: Under president Jim Kim in 2014, the Bank 

underwent a reorganization of sorts and in keeping with 

a “McKinsey-esque” kind of approach it was deemed 

that we needed a very clear mission statement. We 

decided we should be consistent with the Sustainable 

Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN, but we also 

needed our own goals. Those two goals were, first, the 

elimination of extreme poverty, which is Sustainable 

Development Goal #1, to be measured by progress 

toward a global extreme poverty rate of 3%; and second, 

the promotion of shared prosperity, which is our way of 

talking about reducing inequality. Shared prosperity 

would be measured by the extent to which those in the 

bottom 40% of an income distribution are benefitting 

disproportionately from a growth process, which 

sometimes happens and sometimes does not. Levels of 

inequality are lowered when the bottom 40% grows 

faster than the rest.  

Once those were the twin goals, then our 

leadership decided we needed a report card, a periodic 

check-in to see how things are going. Is the world at least 

headed in a direction in which extreme poverty is 

declining and shared prosperity is increasing, even if it 

is hard to make the claim that the World Bank is a 

major causal factor? The first report card, as it were, 

came out in 2016 and was mostly focused on inequality, 

looking at its various forms and manifestations. It was 

then decided that it was only necessary to issue a report 

every other year, so the next report was released in 

2018. This second report focused on questions of data 

and how to expand the depth, breadth, and quality of 

data needed to answer questions about global trends in 

poverty and inequality in a more comprehensive, 

integrated, and accessible way.  

The original vision for the 2020 report, which was 

the one that my friend Samuel Freije-Rodríguez and I 

were recruited to articulate, was to look at political 

economy and implementation questions. If there is 

some broad agreement on how to promote a growth 

process, why is it that this happens so fitfully, or in such 

a piecemeal way around the world? That is where we 

started; that was the original briefing note that we wrote 

and circulated and had approved. We were chugging 

away on that until April, when it became clear that 

COVID was not going to be just a small little blip on 

the screen but instead a historic and existential event, 

and of great consequence for global poverty.  

That realization totally upended what we had been 

asked to write on, which meant that we had the stressful 

task before us – not just of reengineering what we were 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 40 
 

doing in a matter of weeks, but trying to write a report 

in the midst of a pandemic that we figured might only 

get worse, not better, over the window of opportunity 

when this report was going to get written and released 

(which was the last part of 2020). So that is where we 

are. The Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report (PSPR) 

is a biennial document that provides an update on 

progress towards attaining the World Bank’s twin goals 

of poverty reduction and shared prosperity. It is not the 

World Development Report, with which some listeners 

might be more familiar – that is a more formal, 

extensive, theory-grounded statement around a broad 

theme in development (the next one will be on data). 

The essence of the PSPR is to provide an update on 

these twin goals, but then to ground the analysis in a 

particular thematic issue. 

 

RH: Do you have a sense of who reads the report, who 

takes it seriously, and what kind of influence it has? 

 

MW: The PSPR has already been downloaded some 

80,000 times and cited in the media over 2,500 times. I 

don’t know the specific breakdown of its readership by 

particular groups, but it is targeted to policymakers, 

government officials, practitioners, advocates, students, 

and researchers. When you are writing it, you are very 

conscious that this high-profile coverage is the sort of 

reception it is going to get – indeed, it is quite stressful 

to write something that you know is going to be read 

and critiqued by lots of different people in lots of 

different countries in lots of different ways... An 

underappreciated aspect, especially considering the 

research interest of many in the audience today, is that 

we make all the data we use available for free to 

everybody, so that anyone who wants to use the data or 

replicate our analysis can, in principle, do just that. 

Compared to when I was in graduate school, when 

many of us were still working with data out of dated, 

incomplete tables in the annex of big UN reports, the 

ready availability of current data from nearly every 

country in the world is just extraordinary. There is a 

huge behind-the-scenes effort to make all that happen 

in a coherent, accessible way. As for the report, it is 

focused on these twin goals, but we know there are also 

a lot of researchers doing their own analyses, as well as 

professors teaching classes on global poverty and 

development, so everyone now has easy access to what 

is pretty close to the most comprehensive data and 

analysis of global poverty available. Beyond the global 

level, there are other analysts trying to assess these 

issues at a more granular level, looking closely at the 

particular issues and themes we raise and discerning the 

extent to which they play out in their own country, their 

own state or their own communities. And of course 

there is the policy crowd in Washington, New York, 

Geneva and elsewhere who take very seriously the 

global agenda encapsulated in the SDGs and know that 

while these twin goals are important in their own right, 

they are also central to realizing all the other 

development goals. To the extent that poverty and 

inequality is the set of issues around which so much else 

turns, a report that summarizes these key issues at the 

global level, especially in the midst of a devastating 

pandemic, becomes really crucial to a lot of people.  

We try to present this empirical material as best we 

can, but you do not write these reports or work for the 

World Bank without realizing that there are still 

enormous gaps in the data. And regarding global 

poverty itself, there is also controversy in certain 

quarters over whether the Bank is part of the problem 

or part of the solution, so every day you live with the 

knowledge that many people are going to loudly dispute 

the findings, no matter how carefully they are done. 

You do not have to like that reality, but you do have to 

be okay with recognizing that there can sometimes be 

big tradeoffs people make in order to do this work. In 

the end, one can only write these reports in good faith 

and put them out into the public domain, believing that 

they do much of their most important work precisely 

through the sort of conversations that you and I, and 

those attending this seminar, are having now. 

 

RH: The title is called Reversals of Fortune. Can you 

explain the title and why Reversal is plural? What does 

the report cover? 

 

MW: I have some slides, taken from the report, that tell 

the story quite well.   

Slide #1 (next page), on the left-hand side, shows 

us the trend in global poverty since the World Bank 

started systematically collecting data on it back in the 

early 1990s. You can see that there has been an 

underappreciated but massive fall in global poverty: in 

1990 – thirty years ago – over a third of the world’s 

population was living in extreme poverty – that is, on 

less than $2 a day. But with a little blip around 1997-98, 

which was the Asian financial crisis, that number has 

gone down every year to now be at 7%, which is just 

extraordinary. For all the criticisms in various quarters 

about capitalism and globalization, it is just historically 

unprecedented that such a rapid and sustained rate of 

global poverty reduction has occurred. Sure, a lot of 

that is driven by China and India, but this is a global 

report trying to assess trends in global numbers, so 

those aggregate declines in extreme poverty are really 

important. When we talk about a reversal of fortune, 

however, the depressing headline of the PSPR is that 

this steady decline in global poverty has basically come 

to an end; that thirty-year window has closed, at least for 

now.  

 

 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 41 
 

Slide #1  

 
 

For the figures on the right, which document 

changes in shared prosperity (economic growth in the 

bottom 40% of the population), the story is more 

mixed, in part because it is one that is much more 

difficult to measure (so we have fewer data sources to 

draw upon), and in part because inequality generally 

tends to change quite slowly. (We could have a half 

hour conversation on that!) But when you look at the 

early results that have come in from countries around 

the world since the pandemic, you see that there has 

been a consistent rise in inequality as a result of the 

pandemic. The reasons for this have been discussed by 

others and are relatively well understood. For example, 

those people who work in services industries and in 

factories – all the places where a lot of poor people 

work – are the ones with a high risk of contracting and 

spreading COVID. People living and working in such 

circumstances cannot earn a livelihood, like a lot of us 

do, by staring at screens all day in splendid isolation, 

and are far likely to have health insurance, 

unemployment benefits, or access to affordable 

medical care. Minority groups, who tend to be poorer, 

have also suffered higher infection and death rates than 

majority groups.    

By June, as data started to come in on the effects 

of COVID, it became clear that poverty reduction and 

the exacerbation of inequality were both shifting in 

directions that were historically unprecedented. More 

broadly, the global economy was contracting at levels 

that had not been seen since the Great Depression, or 

so it seemed to be in September 2020. The world was 

thus facing a massive economic contraction, an increase 

in poverty, and rising inequality – all of which were 

happening at rates that, at least in our lifetimes, for the 

last seventy years, had not been seen before. That was 

the reversals (plural!) of fortune part. “Reversal of 

Fortune” also happened to be the name of a famous 

paper from twenty years ago by Daron Acemoglu, 

Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (2002). This 

important paper looked at the ways in which 

colonialism and institutions had led, over time, to 

countries that were once rich becoming poor, and those 

that were poor becoming rich. We just took that title 

and said that the world was now living through its own 

reversals – a product not only of COVID, but violent 

conflict and climate change. The Report’s original title 

was “Reversing Reversals of Fortune,” but our 

translators did not like that and it risked taking on too 

much to imagine that our little humble team could 

somehow, in the midst of an ongoing and fluid set of 

overlapping crises, map out a plan for redressing the 

compounding effects of a pandemic, civil wars and 

climate change! So we agreed it was enough to just 

document and explain the reversals of fortune; at the 

end, we can talk about how we came to articulate the 

principles we need to address deep complexity rather 

than a laundry list of policies that might bring about a 

reversal of the reversals.  

 

RH: What are the definitions of poverty and shared 

prosperity that you use in the report? Why did you 

choose them, and why they are important? 

                                         

                                                   
    

                                                 
         



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 42 
 

 

MW: Since the 1990 World Development Report, 

when the Bank first tried to measure global poverty, 

there has been a lot of debate around how one should 

actually do that. I will not go into all of the 

methodological details, or the various critiques of the 

ways the World Bank measures extreme poverty (much 

of which I am quite sympathetic to). However, for the 

purposes of needing something, and something that is 

comparable enough across different countries and 

different levels of development, we actually use three 

poverty lines. Measured monetarily, poverty is a 

continuous rather than a discrete variable, which means 

in real life there is no actual “line” and no qualitative 

difference between going from living 5 cents below a 

“poverty line” to five cents above it. But to the extent 

that you need to have some form of monetary 

benchmark, we use the line that corresponds to the 

poverty rate in the poorest fifteen countries in the 

world. That is where we get the $1.90/day line (roughly 

$2/day). But then, as countries get richer, it costs more 

to live; obviously no one can live in the USA on 

$1.90/hour, let alone $1.90/day. Sometimes it almost 

seems like you need $1.90/minute!  

Following the same logic, we also produce two 

other poverty lines, one corresponding to the poverty 

rate in lower middle-income countries, which comes to 

$3.20/day, and another for the upper middle-income 

countries, which is $5.50/day. As you would expect, as 

people move up from the bottom of the income 

distribution, at $1.90/day, that means you would see a 

rise in the level to $3.20, unless there were a rise also in 

the people who had been making $3.20/day, and then 

moving up to the $5.50, but it usually takes several 

generations for that steady rise to happen. Thus far 

there has not been a lot of movement in the $3.20/day 

and $5.50 lines, in part because quite fundamental 

changes in the economy and society are required to 

generate the sustained economic growth that enable 

more people to rise above those numbers, but also 

because people move into these higher levels of income 

as the number of those living in extreme poverty 

declines. It bears repeating that people are still 

desperately poor even when their incomes double from 

$2 a day to $4 a day.  

One of the innovations for the previous Poverty 

and Shared Prosperity report (in 2018) was to recognize 

that poverty is not just an income issue. There are many 

different ways that people can be poor and be 

discriminated against, so to get an empirical handle on 

this we use what we call a multidimensional poverty 

index, which incorporates not just income but also 

access to health, education, and infrastructure. And 

there are other ways that scholars have tried to get at the 

multifaceted nature of poverty. What is really 

interesting to me is the high variability with regard to the 

extent to which income poverty correlates with other 

dimensions of poverty. In some countries the different 

dimensions are mostly aligned, but in other countries, 

not so much. Niger, for example, shows big differences 

between those who are income poor versus those who 

do not have access to health and education, versus those 

who are just cut off and isolated by not having access to 

roads and other forms of infrastructure. There is no 

clear relationship there, so an interesting research 

agenda would be looking at the conditions under which 

the different dimensions of poverty are closely aligned 

with one another versus others in which various 

measures are needed to better understand why poor 

people are poor (and thus what might be done to 

enhance their welfare).  

It is hard enough just getting income metric data. 

We mentioned the thirty people the World Bank has 

just to do this – they spend their lives trying to reconcile 

the income measures of data from Peru and Pakistan 

and Paraguay, for example. These measures come from 

all over the world, and each country, rightly, measures 

poverty in its own way (albeit often with World Bank 

assistance). But once you start adding anything new to 

the household surveys used to measure poverty – in the 

spirit of trying to be more inclusive, of trying to 

recognize that there are diverse ways of being poor – 

the quality and the quantity of data that you have access 

to falls away quite sharply. Maybe if we are having this 

conversation in 30 or 40 years the world will be all 

nicely mapped out and we will have a detailed real-time 

discussion around poverty dynamics… But for now, we 

are still in the very formative stages of getting the data 

we need, not just in measures of income poverty, but 

especially for all the multidimensional ways in which 

people can be poor. 

 

RH: Can you say more about shared prosperity? 

 

MW: Shared prosperity is the extent of growth in the 

bottom 40% of the population – in its own right (which, 

if it’s positive and sustained, reduces poverty) and 

relative to the rest of the population (which, if it’s higher 

and sustained, reduces inequality). You can see on Slide 

#1 that we only have data from roughly 68 of the world’s 

190 economies for assessing the nature and extent of 

shared prosperity. Measuring shared prosperity is even 

more challenging than measuring poverty, because we 

need to have two data points in time, spaced out far 

enough (at least five years), so that any change can 

actually be detected. But it is just really hard to get 

detailed data across the income spectrum from every 

country in the world spaced five or more years apart 

such that you can assess the growth of the bottom 40% 

relative to everybody else. Even then, 53 of those 68 

economies are upper middle- or high-income 

countries. The places where we need data the most are 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 43 
 

the poorest and fragile states, and countries in conflict. 

But the data are rarely available in such places because 

data gathering on this issue is not a priority for their 

governments, or because it is literally too dangerous to 

collect that kind of information from people. One can 

also try to use satellite data (e.g., on nighttime 

luminosity, comparing rich and poor neighborhoods), 

and top-rates on cell-phone use (poor people do it 

frequently in small amounts; rich people do it 

infrequently, in large amounts)… But household 

surveys remain the gold standard for measuring poverty 

and inequality, and even though things improve a little 

every year, we still have a long way to go. Everyone in 

the world would like to have a detailed discussion about 

inequality measures, and there is a lot of interesting 

qualitative work that can be done around that question 

in very specific places, but when you are trying to tell a 

global story that integrates different ways of measuring 

these things across 190 economies, it gets really hard. 

That is why we try to tell a more nuanced story around 

shared prosperity, because that is what the data suggest. 

Yet it is also the case that we don’t have enough data 

from the places where we really need it most, and it is 

going to take a while for us to have it. 

 

RH: Let’s talk about the data and other such 

methodological issues. It is obvious that obtaining good 

data is problematic. How has COVID impacted your 

data gathering? How do you maintain reasonable 

sources of data in such a time as this? 

 

MW: I will try to simplify a complicated story, and 

complicate what some might think is a simple story… 

One big issue is that countries should be allowed to 

measure poverty as they think best. They are sovereign 

nations, with elected governments that have policy 

priorities and public resources that they should use to 

respond to the concerns of their citizens. Being in 

accordance with the survey measurement protocols of 

the World Bank and the UN might be nice, but it is not 

likely to be a high priority for them. To the extent that 

the World Bank can advise and offer itself as a 

repository of global expertise on these things, it does so. 

But at the end of the day, you are still left wanting to 

respect the principle that countries should measure 

these things in their own way. This is all fine, until you 

are a 30-year-old consultant at the World Bank who is 

given 130 different data sets from 150 countries, 

collected in 100 different ways, who then has to follow 

specific internal methodological protocols to ensure 

that how the Brazilians have measured it can be 

reconciled with how the Congolese have measured it, 

and then turn all of that into something that becomes 

the simple, clean graphs like the one we see in Slide #1!  

There is an enormous amount of work that goes 

into all this. Even seemingly basic distinctions between 

whether you measure poverty by income, expenditure, 

salaries, assets, or recollections of how much money 

their small business has earned in the last month or 

weeks make a difference when assessing poverty, and 

greatly complicates efforts to aggregate and compare. 

Most Latin American countries, for example, measure 

economic welfare through income, whereas most of the 

rest of the world wants to measure it by how much 

people spend, on the grounds that poor  people are 

more likely to be able to recall their expenditures, and 

also because their expenditures vary more – if one 

works in agriculture, for example, there will be boom 

periods when crops come in and you get a lot of money, 

but other times when you have very little money and 

thus need to balance expenditure over the course of the 

year. Which is hard to do. If you are working in 

manufacturing, you might expect your salary to be a 

little more consistent and perhaps be verified in the 

form of a pay slip. Either way, there are strengths and 

weaknesses to both approaches, especially when 

working in very poor communities – but they will likely 

yield different findings that then have to reconciled to 

tell a credible global story about trends in poverty 

reduction and inequality.  

If you are working on a report like this, how do you 

reconcile the various ways in which data is collected? 

Researchers have found ways to do that, but these are 

the kinds of nerdy challenges that someone wanting to 

tell a global story about poverty has to deal with all the 

time. To hark back to your earlier question, most of 

what we do when we are trying to extrapolate into the 

future or even just describe what is going on now, is 

done on the basis of extrapolating on past trends, 

working with growth data (which is strongly correlated 

with poverty) or using data that is collected more 

frequently, such telephone surveys. But every approach 

has its limits, so there are always difficult trade-offs to 

be made.   

One of the big challenges for the report, and that 

you can see in Slide #1, is that data stop at 2017. Why 

does it do that? Because that is how long it takes to go 

from having enough household surveys that have been 

properly cleaned and analyzed so they can be 

reconciled. It is about a two-year process, and not every 

country is collecting poverty data every year. This 

means you have to adjust the data to fit a common year 

– if the data were collected in 2018, we have to try to get 

that back to 2017. If they were collected in 2016, we 

have to nudge it forward so that we have a single year 

and we can line all these things up. The harsh reality is 

that we will not have detailed household level poverty 

survey results that include COVID until at least the next 

report in 2022, but even then, researchers will be 

looking only at what was available up until around 2019 

and 2020. It could be several more years before we have 

the sophisticated household level data surveys that we 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 44 
 

need to be able to tell precise stories at the level of detail 

we want to. To assess present and future trends, we are 

largely using the national accounts data on economic 

growth, which is not in real time, but at least gets 

updated every six months and enables us to make good-

enough estimates of current poverty trends at the 

national level. As such, new data will be coming out in 

March of this year that will provide a clearer sense of 

where poverty is going. (There will doubtless be blogs 

on this, so if you’re really keen, keep an eye on the 

World Bank’s Poverty website: 

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty). 

 

RH: The report argues that there are three main 

culprits of the reversals; COVID-19, Violent 

Conflict, and Climate Change. Are they equal 

partners? Is COVID the more serious? Is there 

synergy among all three? 

   

MW: We wrestled at lot with these questions. The 

methodological challenge is that you have what we 

came to call the three Cs –COVID, Climate, and 

Conflict – all unfolding along very different 

trajectories. COVID is here and now; it is this big 

spike, this huge, global challenge affecting everyone, 

a real and present danger that has to be dealt with 

now. Climate change, on the other hand, is like a 

slow-moving escalator; it is inexorable, but its 

trajectory of impact on poverty, at least for the next 

decade or so, is still likely to be relatively small. My 

colleagues who are experts on climate change say 

that the effects are real now, but they are going to be 

vastly more consequential in 2040 and 2050 when 

all of the big effects start to really kick in. In the 

estimates for this report, we show that at least over 

the next decade, up until 2030, there will be an extra 

100 million people put back into extreme poverty as 

a result of climate change, and there is a roughly 

similar number with violent conflict.  

Conflict is another really difficult phenomenon 

to disentangle from or aggregate into other 

processes and factors of change, because it happens 

in very particular places, it comes and it goes at 

varying levels of intensity, but its impacts can endure 

long after a war has ended. We commissioned a new 

paper for this report which showed that even long 

after a war has ended, such as in a country like 

Nepal, the effects of the war they had 15-20 years 

ago still linger. The effects of war are just so 

insidious – on people’s mental health, the enduring 

risk of hidden landmines and bombs that are left 

unexploded, permanent physical injury. We had to 

write this report trying to help people distinguish 

between outcomes whose effects are relatively clear 

in the present (as the data in Slide #2 show, which is 

this rise in extreme poverty back up to between 

9.1% to 9.4% this year), but whose multiple causes - 

 

Slide #2 

 

 

 

                                           
                                   

   

   

      

   

   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

   

   

      

   

         

      

   

   

   

   
   

   

      

   

   
   

   
      

   

   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

      

   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

      

   

   

   

   

      

   

      

   

   

   

   
   

   

   
   

    

    

    

   

   

   

   

                                   

 
  
  
 
  
 
  
  
 
  
  
 
  
 
 
  

 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 

  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 

                               

                                           
                    

                                    

                                  

                                                    
    

https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty


Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 45 
 

COVID, climate change and conflict – are 

compounding one another, but doing so in different 

ways in different places at different rates for different 

groups. That makes it far from obvious what 

constitutes the ‘best’ way to respond, especially 

when many of the policy solutions themselves are 

contested and fluid. 

The report also drew on earlier work to show 

that although only 10% of the world’s population 

lives in fragile and conflict countries, roughly 40% of 

the world’s extreme poverty is located in such 

countries. In the report we overlay these places with 

where the risks of floods are high, which in turn 

enables us to identify the world’s “hot spots” – areas 

that have to deal simultaneously with all of the three 

Cs, even as they unfold on very different trajectories, 

in countries with varying levels of resources and 

capability to deal with them. Most of these hot spots 

are in Sub Saharan Africa.  

What does one do about any of this? 

Obviously, there are no easy answers, but it fell to 

me to write the concluding chapter for this report on 

how the world deals simultaneously with conflict, 

climate change, and COVID – the three Cs  – when 

nobody really knows how to deal with any of them. 

I had to write something knowing full well that tens 

of thousands of people were going to be reading it 

in search of guidance of how to deal with a once-in-

a-century set of compounding problems! The 

pressure was intense. We have talked about 

methodological issues, but there were also serious 

political issues to contend with. India, for example, 

did not release its poverty data to us, because they 

were very skittish about what the data showed. A 

huge percentage of the world’s poor people live in 

India, so the fact that India did not make data 

available to us meant that we had to do some pretty 

creative accounting to get around that, while 

providing due acknowledgment of what those 

limitations are. Whether it is in the politics, the 

nerdy methodological issues, or the structural 

characteristics of these different kinds of problems, 

the challenges of writing this report all unfolded and 

reinforced one another in very different ways and 

different places. Once the report is done, the task 

for national policymakers, sector specialists and 

follow-up research in places like Cameroon and 

Peru is to ask “How did these three Cs play out in 

this country? What kinds of policies and forms of 

assistance would be the most useful for it? And 

having decided on the optimal policy response, how 

do government and citizens ensure that they actually 

get implemented?” Those are the key questions 

currently facing governments, multilateral agencies 

and NGOs everywhere… 

 

RH: I was struck by the following quote from the 

report: “the pandemic’s impoverishing effects will be 

vast (6).” Can you explain why (or how) COVID-19 has 

been so harmful to the poor?  Are these short-term or 

long-term effects?  It seems the global economy is 

poised to bounce back as the pandemic winds down. 

Will the poor bounce back too? 

 

MW: There is a lot in that question. Let’s start by 

looking at another slide (next page).  

The spider diagram in slide #3 speaks to what we 

know to be the broad characteristics of poor people in 

general. The outside line says that most people who are 

poor live in rural areas, have little or no education, work 

in agriculture, and are either self-employed or working 

in a small family business. The consequences of 

COVID on what we are calling the “new poor,” or those 

newly rendered extremely poor as a result of COVID, 

are not just an extension of the characteristics of the 

chronically poor, but instead tend to fall hardest on 

those who are more urban, have some form of 

education, are based disproportionately in lower 

middle-income countries, and working not in 

agriculture but rather in manufacturing and services, 

and therefore working for somebody else rather than 

for themselves. What everyone hopes for is V-shaped 

recovery – a relatively rapid rebound after a sharp fall. 

The grounds for optimism that this could happen rest 

on the assumption that if those big impacts have 

occurred disproportionately in urban areas and to 

people with higher levels of education, then that might 

mean the rebound could be faster and less severe for 

those rendered poor as a result of COVID. But there 

is enormous heterogeneity around that. These trends 

were emerging when we were finishing up the report in 

September, but in the months since then the picture has 

become clearer as a result of data collected from real-

time telephone surveys.  

Developing countries, at least from a public health 

standpoint, thus far seem to have been less affected by 

all this than originally anticipated. The absence of 

testing no doubt make the picture rosier than it 

probably is, but a bigger looming challenge is how this 

is going to affect countries like Kenya and Bolivia where 

it was decided that school would be cancelled for a 

whole year. Once you do that, it means a whole cohort 

of students will have lost an entire year’s worth of 

education that probably can never be regained. The 

human capital consequences of that are going to be 

cascade down through the coming years, for the rest of 

their lives… That said, some countries have figured out 

how to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Niger has done 

a really amazing job of helping their kids gain access to 

online education, using the crisis as a moment to push 

forward and modernize an education system that was 

previously not in a position to do that. But perhaps the  



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 46 
 

Slide #3 

 
 

 

biggest problem now – and all of this has happened 

since the report was released – is with the rollout of the 

vaccine and the political economy of who receives what, 

when. We see that poor countries, very predictably, will 

struggle to compete with the rich countries in the quest 

for a finite pool of vaccines, and that granting access to 

vaccines has become “a new tool of diplomacy”, as a 

recent headline put it. Huge amounts of uncertainty 

remain. To the extent that the initial impacts seem to 

have been less catastrophic than they might have been, 

which is good, the bigger question for all of us – 

especially those of us on this call, who probably have 

not been as affected by this as much as a lot of other 

people – is discerning what constitutes a just response. 

How does one forge a social movement and a set of 

institutional and financial mechanisms that enable a 

more just global response to a global problem? That is 

a big question for all of us. Precedents set in the current 

moment will linger for a long time… 

 

RH: What is your answer to that big question? Who 

are the main players, and what are they doing?  The 

report goes into this in a general way, but maybe 

there are some other ideas you would like to share. 

 

MW: In Africa there has been a move to pool 

countries together, as a single continent-wide 

market, so that they can then compete against other 

regions for access to this finite pool of resources. 

But if it is just African money versus North 

American money versus European money, that is 

still going to be vastly inadequate. I am a proud 

multilateralist. I believe that, on a good day, 

multilateral institutions can play a much more 

balancing and countervailing role in trying to ensure 

that their client governments and their counterparts 

in this whole drama get a much fairer shot. There is 

a lot of money at stake here, which could mean 

countries taking on debt levels that might otherwise 

make analysts nervous, so multilateral agencies can 

help to ensure that debt levels needed to obtain 

vaccines are manageable. We can also do some 

symbolic things, like World Bank staff putting 

themselves at the bottom of the priority lists for 

receiving COVID vaccinations, because we are not 

that important, and we all have health insurance 

systems that enable us to weather this.  

Whether it is symbolic steps like this or more 

hard-nosed negotiation around trying to ensure that 

those who are most vulnerable get first access to the 

vaccines, whether this can be institutionalized, and 

whether the new US administration will be a 

stronger force for all of that, all remains to be seen. 

We are witnessing a modern manifestation of an 

ancient problem. It is about how we all get along, 

and how our differences, especially our wealth 

differences, coalesce into a more just outcome. No 

one has the answers to that, but every generation 

struggles with it. This is our generational moment, 

and I hope global solutions can be found for a global 

problem. Globalization has produced this problem, 

                                           
                                   

   

   

      

   

   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

   

   

      

   

         

      

   

   

   

   
   

   

      

   

   
   

   
      

   

   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

      

   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

   

   
   

   

   

      

   

   

   

   

      

   

      

   

   

   

   
   

   

   
   

    

    

    

   

   

   

   

                                   

 
  
  
 
  
 
  
  
 
  
  
 
  
 
 
  

 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 

  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 

                               

                                           
                    

                                    

                                  

                                                    
    



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 47 
 

and it is exacerbated by people of privilege – a bad 

virus is spread by the same means as all the good 

things we enjoy, like trade and travel. As a matter of 

theology and moral principle, we should be the ones 

who bear the greatest costs for how we deal with it. 

The harsh reality is that this is not how power works, 

yet part of what being a person of faith means is that 

we become advocates for those who cannot 

advocate effectively for themselves. 

 

RH: In terms of policy advice, what do you suggest 

for both the new US government and for NGOs, 

especially Christian NGOs? 

 

MW: Let me take the second question first. When 

we were writing the report, we did not want to say 

how great the World Bank has been in responding 

to all this. Instead, we wanted to highlight examples 

in particular countries of ways in which different 

stakeholders, for example NGOs – not in isolation 

but working in partnership with the private sector 

and with governments – were together able to figure 

out how to deal with wrenchingly difficult 

circumstances. We provide a nice example from 

Mumbai, India of how in the slum settlements, 

where thousands of poor people were cramped 

together with minimal sanitation which could have 

resulted in a massive spread of COVID, the 

response was not just a single effort of an all-

powerful state or a nimble private sector or heroic 

NGOs. It was a partnership among all three that 

stopped a major public health crisis from 

happening.  

That is the kind of response and solution we 

wanted to highlight— interesting partnerships in 

which experts, leaders, and everyday citizens had 

found ways to harness the comparative advantage of 

different sectors to address these kinds of complex 

challenges together. NGOs have a particular 

comparative advantage, but so too do governments, 

companies, and multilateral agencies. They all have 

different mandates, resourcing levels, skills, and 

local legitimacy that they can call upon to address 

these challenges. The magic is figuring out how to 

put these together. Great leadership can enable that 

to happen, and divisive leadership means it will not 

happen – and then all these differences just 

compound themselves, leading to confusion, 

duplication, and waste. The report was very much 

trying to say that no matter who you work for, there 

is a place for you; the magic is to bring what you do 

and to work in partnership with what other people 

do so that you do together what you could never do 

alone. 

 

RH: So, collaboration, global collaboration and 

local collaboration are big watchwords? 

 

MW: Yes, and across disciplines as well. 

Collaboration generally… that was one of the 

principles we invoked in the conclusion, precisely 

because no one knows what to do in this situation. 

It has never happened before at this scale or this 

speed. No one has lived through anything like this, 

but to make sense of it everyone wants to make it a 

version of something they already understand. Is 

this a version of HIV? Is it another version of 

Ebola? A natural instinct is to frame both the 

problem and thus the solution as variants on 

something we are already familiar with. But what we 

face today is unique, a global problem that requires 

a global solution. That is a cliché at one level, but 

what it means is that we have to respond to this 

ancient challenge of how different people with 

different abilities and different resourcing levels 

figure out how to harness their respective abilities 

and resources with each other to have a positive 

impact. That makes it a quintessential collective 

action problem that is well understood in social 

science. How we learn to actually overcome it, 

however, and how we enact it in the face of the kinds 

of challenges that a pandemic places on us, is always 

unclear because the ‘right’ answer inherently turns 

on the contingencies of context. There are always 

lots of devils lurking in lots of details.   

To return to your first question on policy advice 

and the new US government… At the moment you 

can only go on the decisions of appointees and the 

symbolic nature of what has already been said, but I 

think it is pretty clear that the incoming 

administration is going to adopt a more traditional 

American understanding of its place among many in 

the global community of nations. Appointing 

Samantha Powers as the incoming administrator of 

USAID and giving that appointee a very high stature 

in the cabinet is one important step. She has won a 

Pulitzer prize for her literary and moral 

contributions to the thinking about ending wars and 

being able to provide effective leadership. All of 

that, at least to me, signals very powerfully that the 

new administration will adopt a much more 

vigorous view of development and a much richer 

appreciation that effective development, 

engagement with refugees, and defense of human 

rights and democracy is both a moral and strategic 

imperative. Even so, we need to remember that 

anything done in the aid space is still only a small 

fraction of what the new stimulus bill might look 

like. The current USAID budget of 40 billion 

dollars is just a drop in the ocean compared to how 

big one round of stimulus can be in the US. But 



Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy 2(2), Winter 2021  

COVID, Climate Change, Conflict, and Global Poverty, Interview with Michael Woolcock 48 
 

though small, it is still important. It can make a 

difference, and good people working with those 

resources under the right circumstances can 

themselves make a difference. To the extent that the 

alignment of levels of resourcing and adequate 

political support map onto an effective 

implementation system, we can be guardedly 

optimistic that things will be, at least in the short run, 

restored to where they once were, and maybe even 

more, given the nature of the challenges that we now 

all face.  

 

RH: You said you were guardedly optimistic. At this 

point in your life do you have hope? 

 

MW: I think everyone in development is 

congenitally optimistic. We are familiar with the 

concept of selection bias – “development people” 

are probably not representative of the population 

more generally! But everybody who signs up for a 

career in development, if their eyes are even vaguely 

open, has to be aware of how painfully difficult it is 

for most poor people in the world to live their lives. 

There is no romanticizing any of that, and there is 

just so much awfulness going on, so much injustice 

in terms of how people experience the world and 

how inadequate their opportunities for redress 

actually are. Part of being called into this business is 

constantly being a person of hope. You have to be; 

otherwise, you just get too depressed. But if you put 

on a different set of glasses, you see that there are a 

lot of reasons for optimism. It is extraordinary how 

people can work together As I think I said when I 

spoke at Calvin University many years ago, I had 

extraordinarily positive experiences in my 

upbringing, in my church, in my early development 

work, and they have to be to inure you against the 

harsher realities that inevitably come up, like 

COVID for example, and the rise of 

authoritarianism around the world.  

Still, there will be ways in which we are 

continually disappointed, because, very predictably, 

like with the vaccine situation, the rich countries are 

dominating this process. But at least there are 

mechanisms in place to deal with that. If you were 

living at a different time in history, there would be 

no way of alerting people to this type of reality; there 

would be no legal or geopolitical mechanisms in 

place for trying to do anything different, no tools or 

procedures for being able to share innovations and 

experiences from around the world in real time. 

Once those are happening as they are, then you 

have to keep believing that both the letter and the 

spirit of what these organizations exist to do – 

whether big ones like the World Bank, or smaller 

ones like your favorite NGO – have a place, an 

important role to play. Being people of faith, as I 

said at the beginning, means to keep offering up 

what we have, which we do in a spirit of sharing and 

optimism, because that is what we are called to do. 

It will always feel inadequate; we will always feel 

swamped by these bigger forces in the world. And 

that is not just from a Christian perspective. But 

there are so many people in development who 

come to it from a faith perspective, because they 

have these inner resources and the connections to 

something bigger than themselves that enable them 

to believe that offering up what they have, and 

standing up for those who cannot stand for 

themselves, is what we “to whom much has been 

given” are called to do. And when we do that, 

beautiful things happen, in ways we cannot always 

understand, and in ways that we cannot even see 

sometimes. When we act on that principle, that is 

how we sustain careers and lives in trying to do our 

bit to make things a little better. 

 

RH: Thank you again for being with us today, 

Michael. We pray God’s blessing on you, your 

family, and on all the work you are doing at the 

World Bank. 

 

 

References 

 

Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, Robinson, 

James A. 2002. “Reversal of Fortune: 

Geography and Institutions in the Making of 

the Modern World Income Distribution.” The 

Quarterly Journal of Economics 117(4): 1231-

1294. https://economics.mit.edu/files/4127.  

 

https://economics.mit.edu/files/4127

