The world is emerging from a series of shocks that led to widespread turmoil in lives and livelihoods. The COVID-19 pandemic generated the worst economic downturn since the Second World War and had a disproportionate impact on the poor and vulnerable. Following the initial shock, the recovery was similarly uneven and was further hampered by a cost-of-living crisis that quickly unfolded as food and energy prices skyrocketed.Although historically low global poverty figures before the pandemic reflect a steady decline over several decades, extreme poverty has been increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile and conflict-affected countries.The latter set of countries host about 10 percent of the global population but nearly 40 percent of the global poor. Understanding the welfare of vulnerable populations, including during times of economic shocks, is therefore critical to addressing threats to the trajectory of global poverty and shared prosperity.Amid the devastating impacts of the pandemic, the crisis created an opportunity for a largescale data collection effort on forcibly displaced populations (FDPs)—a group on which there exist significant data gaps. This started out as a series of country-level efforts that served as the basis for a newly harmonized database of phone surveys from 14 countries during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This contemporaneous database of host and displaced populations offers unique insights into the welfare of FDPs relative to their hosts, while also allowing for comparisons between different populations of concern (internally displaced persons, refugees, hosts) and accommodation types (in camps, out of camps).The newly harmonized database represents a rich source of information in a context where there has been little coordinated research on how systemic shocks differentially affect forcibly displaced and host populations.