João Pedro Azevedo

João Pedro Azevedo

Chief Statistician @ UNICEF | Development Economist

Evidence & Analytics for Action

I use data, measurement, and applied economics to support better decisions for children and vulnerable populations. Across UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Brazilian public sector, my work sits at the intersection of development economics, education policy, poverty and equity measurement, and the strengthening of national statistical systems.

My focus is operational: translating complex data into indicators, diagnostics, scalable analytics, and decision-support tools; evaluating policies and programs; and strengthening institutional capacity to produce timely, comparable, and reproducible evidence. Recent work includes creating global public goods such as the Learning Poverty measure and quantifying the impacts of COVID-19 on learning and intergenerational mobility.

Increasingly, I am leading teams to use AI- and LLM-assisted workflows to improve analytical productivity and increase the dissemination and interpretability of rigorous analysis—within clear technical and ethical guardrails and with human-in-the-loop review (e.g., validation, documentation, continuous integration and deployment, privacy/PII safeguards, and auditability).

Core Research Agendas

1. Poverty, Equity, and Wellbeing

This agenda focuses on poverty, equity, and wellbeing—covering child poverty and child outcomes, but also broader distributional analysis, shared prosperity, and the measurement systems that translate evidence into policy.

Sub-theme: Poverty, Equity, and Distributional Analysis

Analyzing the drivers of inequality and the distributional impacts of policies and shocks—grounded in country-level diagnostics and extended to regional and cross-country benchmarking—with a focus on equity for children and vulnerable populations.

  • Code HOI — Human Opportunity Index (incl. Colombia and Latin America applications)
  • Code ADECOMP — Shapley decomposition of poverty changes (incl. Latin America applications)

Sub-theme: Child Poverty and Wellbeing Measurement (SDGs)

Developing frameworks and indicators to monitor progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for children, including comparable measurement and reporting.

Sub-theme: Child Health and Mortality

Investigating the determinants of child health and mortality, and how systems, services, and risk factors shape outcomes.

2. Education, Learning, and Human Capital

This is a central pillar of my research, with a focus on ensuring quality education for all. This work involves measuring educational outcomes, diagnosing inequalities in learning, and evaluating the impact of educational interventions and global shocks.

Sub-theme: Learning Poverty and Foundational Skills

A core contribution of my work at the World Bank was the co-creation of the global "Learning Poverty" indicator—a measure of the percentage of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10. This research stream involves the harmonization of learning assessments and the analysis of policies to accelerate progress in foundational learning.

  • Code LearningPoverty — Stata package to calculate Learning Poverty indicators
  • Code EduAnalytics — World Bank Education Global Practice analytics tools
  • Code GLAD — Harmonized learning assessment microdata from 160+ countries

Sub-theme: The Educational Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic

In response to the global crisis, I led research to simulate and measure the impact of school closures on learning outcomes. This work quantified the scale of "learning losses," analyzed the effectiveness of remote learning strategies, and informed global education recovery efforts.

3. Data Systems, Methods, and Statistical Capacity

Underpinning all my research is a focus on improving the data and methods we use to measure development. This includes strengthening national statistical systems, developing new econometric tools, and making data more accessible and useful for policymakers and researchers.

Sub-theme: Data for Policy and Global Monitoring

This work focuses on building evidence-to-policy pipelines, from the global harmonization of household surveys for poverty monitoring to the development of data compacts that align countries and partners around common measurement goals.

Sub-theme: Global Poverty Monitoring Infrastructure

Work on building the data architecture for the World Bank's global poverty monitoring, including the harmonization of over 1,200 household surveys, development of PovcalNet/PIP, DATALIBWEB, and leadership of the Data for Goals initiative.

Sub-theme: Econometric and Statistical Software Development

To support rigorous and reproducible research, I have developed over 20 open-source statistical packages, primarily for Stata. These tools have been downloaded over 25,000 times by the global research community.

  • Code WBOPENDATA — Access World Bank databases from Stata
  • Code SAE / FHSAE — Small area estimation: unit- and area-level models
  • Code ADECOMP — Shapley decomposition of poverty changes
  • Code HOI — Human Opportunity Index
  • Code DFL — DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux counterfactual density decomposition

View all 22 software modules on the Software page →

For a complete and filterable list of all my work, please see the Publications Page.