Imputing poverty indicators without consumption data: an exploratory analysis

Crawford School of Public Policy | Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 08 August 2023
10.00am–11.30am

Venue

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Hai-Anh H. Dang, World Bank

Accurate poverty measurement relies on household consumption data, but such data are often inadequate, outdated or display inconsistencies over time in poorer countries. As a solution to these data challenges, we employ survey-to-survey imputation to produce estimates for several poverty indicators including headcount poverty, extreme poverty, poverty gap, near-poverty rates, as well as mean consumption levels and the entire consumption distribution. Analyzing 22 multi-topic household surveys conducted over the past decade in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Vietnam, we find encouraging results. Adding either household utility expenditures or food expenditures to basic imputation models with household-level demographic, employment, and asset variables could improve the probability of imputation accuracy between 0.1 and 0.4. Adding geospatial data on agricultural soil quality could further increase imputation accuracy. We also find that a larger time interval between surveys is associated with a lower probability of predicting some poverty indicators, but a better model goodness-of-fit (R2) does not help. These results offer cost-saving inputs into future survey design.

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