Project Overview
UN Steering Committee on Poverty Statistics
  Activities and Meetings
  Outline of the Handbook as of October 2003
  Outline of the Handbook as of July 2004
Instructions on the Format of Manuscripts
   
  Chapter 1. Preface and introduction
Chapter 2. Overview of concepts and fundamentals of poverty measurements
  Chapter 3. Practices of poverty measurements
  Chapter 4. Statistical tools and estimation methods for poverty measures based on household surveys
  Chapter 5. Statistical issues in measuring poverty from non-survey sources
  Chapter 6. Poverty analysis for national policy use: poverty profiles, mapping and dynamics
  Chapter 7. Conclusions and recommendations
  Addendum
 
 
 

ST/ESA/STAT/POVERTY/WWW
1 February 2004

Handbook on Poverty Statistics:
Concepts, Methods and Policy Use

Chapter 4. Statistical tools and estimation methods for poverty measures based on household surveys

To discuss the surveys - income and expenditure surveys, LSMS, time-use surveys, DHS, labour surveys, appraisal surveys - as sources of data for poverty assessments based on monetary as well as non-monetary approaches; To highlight the practical difficulties involved in generating reliable and comparable estimates - definition of terms, sampling, periodicity, frequency, regional differences and other sources of nonrandom error, costliness and other constraints; to offer options to address specific survey design issues that could potentially affect the interpretation of - or bias- poverty estimates and changes in the estimates - income or consumption; the use of a reference person rather than a "household head" as unit of measurement; imputations and value of non-market services; To pay due consideration to survey techniques relevant for assessing the well-being of specific target groups - the poorest, earnings from informal enterprise, itinerant and refugees populations, social minorities - and for collecting information of non-economic components of well-being - to consider characteristics having different unit of analysis - individual, household, community, regional and national; To address specific statistical and data issues in longitudinal analyses - attrition of the sample over time; high mobility among specific groups - and to describe how measurement errors can particularly bias analyses of transience and vulnerability, and to provide guidance for the analysis and interpretation of the data; To address the need for developing gender-specific data collection instruments to enable poverty analysis from a gender perspective.