How evenly does the State reach people across its territory? This is the question at the heart of our @WorldBankGroup Policy Research Working Paper "Territorial Inequalities: A Note on State Discontinuity", co-authored with Lidia Ceriani and Samuel D. Restrepo-Oyola. Building on Guillermo O’Donnell’s concept of “state discontinuity,” we ask how we can measure something that citizens experience very concretely: the State does not always have the same presence or responsiveness across the territory. A country can have strong institutions and relatively good national indicators—and still have places where the State barely reaches. In our paper, we propose a way to measure this discontinuity as the unequal distribution of state density across regions. Using data from 32 developing countries and 545 subnational regions, we examine state presence through basic services, education, health, and security. Why does this matter? Because when the State reaches some territories effectively but neglects others, it creates pockets of exclusion and shapes people’s opportunities to participate fully in economic, social, and political life. Understanding inequality, therefore, requires looking not only at who is being left behind, but also at where the State is leaving people behind. Our contribution is to make this territorial dimension of state effectiveness measurable and comparable: documents.worldbank.org/en/p…