Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS)
The Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) is a household survey program housed within the Survey Unit of the World Bank's Development Data Group that provides technical assistance to national statistical offices (NSOs) in the design and implementation of multi-topic household surveys. Since its inception in the early 1980s, the LSMS program has worked with dozens of statistics offices around the world to generate high-quality data, incorporate innovative technologies, improve survey methodologies, and build technical capacity. The surveys conducted with LSMS support cover many countries around the world. The LSMS website hosts many of these surveys - for others, links are provided to the websites of the relevant national statistics offices. Data can be found using the included tools: the World Bank Microdata Catalog, the LSMS Dataset Finder, the LSMS Information Table, or the list of Panel Surveys.
In addition to data, the LSMS web site provides access to publications in the form of research papers, guidebooks, working papers and briefs.
The LSMS team also provides technical support across the World Bank through courses and workshops to train researchers and practitioners in key aspects of household survey design, implementation and analysis and measurement and monitoring of poverty.
The LSMS team also works with national statistics offices to design and implement household surveys with a strong focus on agriculture. The Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) is a household survey project established with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented by the LSMS team. Recognizing that existing agricultural data in the region suffers from inconsistent investment, institutional and sectoral isolation, and methodological weakness, the LSMS-ISA project collaborates with the national statistics offices in eight partner countries in Sub-Saharan Africa ((Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda) to design and implement systems of multi-topic, nationally representative panel household surveys with a strong focus on agriculture and the links between agriculture and poverty reduction in the region.
In each partner country, the LSMS-ISA supports multiple rounds of a nationally representative panel survey with a multi-topic approach designed to improve the understanding of the links between agriculture, socioeconomic status, and non-farm income activities. The frequency of data collection is determined on a country-by-country basis, depending on data demand and the availability of complementary funding. The data collected in each project country is fully cleaned, documented and publicly available within 12 months of the completion of each survey round. The data is disseminated by each country's statistics office website as well as the LSMS website.
Countries currently with LSMS-ISA datasets: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda.