ST/ESA/STAT/POVERTY/WWW
15 March 2005
Handbook on Poverty Statistics:
Concepts, Methods and Policy Use
Outline of the Handbook
(Revision of the second round of comments
from Experts, October 2003)
Contents
Chapter 1. Preface and introduction (10 pages)
Chapter 2. Concepts and fundamentals of poverty measurements (30
pages)
Chapter 3. Past and present practices of poverty measurements
(30 pages)
Chapter 4. Statistical tools and estimation methods for poverty
measures based on household surveys (40 pages)
Chapter 5. Statistical issues in measuring poverty from non-survey
sources (40 pages)
Chapter 6. Poverty analysis for national policy use: poverty profiles,
mapping and dynamics (30 pages)
Chapter 7. Global Poverty comparisons (20 pages)
Chapter 8. Conclusions and recommendations (10 pages)
Annotated Outline
In April 2003 the United Nations Statistics Division prepared
a provisional annotated outline that was used as the basis to initiate
the discussion among the experts on the content and structure of the publication.
The outline was finalized based on their comments. This outline has been
presented and discussed at the regional workshops conducted in 2004 (Rio
de Janeiro,10-13 May 2004; Abuja, 26-30 July 2004, Manila, 7-8 October
2004, Jordan, 1-2 December 2004) in order to incorporate regional perspectives
.
Chapter 1. Preface and introduction (10 pages)
To set the scope of the publication, what it includes and what it does
not include;
To explain what types of poverty statistics are needed for what purpose
(i.e. why/when different poverty measures are important and relevant for
specific policy purposes);
To make clear the distinction between national and global poverty estimates
and to address the role of inter-country comparisons and regional and
global totals in description, causal inference and policy-making at both
the national and the global level;
To specify the target users of the publication (e.g. statisticians and
data producers, policy makers at national and international levels);
Chapter 2. Concepts and fundamentals of poverty measurements (30 pages)
To highlight the conceptual debates surrounding: concepts of poverty
- dimensions of well being - absolute vs. relative poverty; approaches
to measurement - based on monetary indicators vs. social and other non-monetary
indicators (also referred as: access to basic needs, services and basic
capital formation); objective and subjective experience of poverty - methods
for integrating and reconciling subjective and objective indicators; poverty
lines such as food poverty lines, national, regional, international poverty
lines; poverty indices and units - head counts, poverty gap; poverty comparisons
- based on stochastic dominance; the case for a "system" of
poverty monitoring comprising point estimates and distributional measures,
snapshots and time series estimates, within and across country comparisons;
To provide references for an in-depth study of these topics.
Chapter 3. Past and present practices of poverty measurements (30
pages)
To review past and present practices of poverty measurement, highlighting
the progressive broadening of the definition and measurement of poverty
- from command over income to other dimensions of well being (e.g. longevity,
education, health) and more recently, to risk, vulnerability, powerlessness
and lack of voice; to pay attention to the rapid changing international
and global context and its effect on poverty measurement. (10 pages)
Based in part on the experiences accumulated by the Rio Group and four
regional workshops organized in connection with the project: to discuss
the data availability and quality of existing poverty statistics (e.g.
at national and sub-national and global levels, disaggregated by gender);
to review country practices including methodologies/concepts, data collection
tools, the regularity and disaggregation of the estimates; to understand
the difficulties/barriers (institutional/technical/financial) countries
face and what is needed to respond to the growing demand for adequate
and timely data to guide the design of policies aimed at reducing poverty
and for monitoring purpose. Attention will be given to the interplay between
national and international stakeholders in providing poverty data for
HDR, PRSP, CCA and the MDGR. (20 pages)
Chapter 4. Statistical tools and estimation methods for poverty measures
based on household surveys (40 pages)
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 non-random 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.
Chapter 5. Statistical issues in measuring poverty from non-survey sources
(40 pages)
To review other sources of data for poverty assessments: National accounts,
population censuses, public sector financial data, administrative records
from line ministries and qualitative data from participatory techniques;
To address the current debate on the (mis) use of national accounts for
poverty measures and to discuss alternatives for reconciling the survey
and national accounts estimate of household consumption through a harmonized
approach to household survey and national accounts;
Chapter 6. Poverty analysis for national policy use: poverty profiles,
mapping and dynamics (30 pages)
(Analytical techniques presented throughout this chapter will be illustrated
by data examples from country cases such as to provide clear and practical
guidance to the reader.)
To answer questions such as - what are the characteristics of poor households,
who are poor and how to target them, how long does it take them to exit
poverty, is poverty transient or persistent; to provide guidance for the
analysis of the pattern and change in poverty - address issues related
to per capita measures such as, adult equivalence and scale economies;
to stress the importance of price indices - regional prices and "poverty-focused"
CPI, in particular, of having relevant, viz. operationally significant
measures of changes in the "cost of living" to parallel assessments
of poverty levels; to pay more attention to the wider longitudinal/panel
aspect of poverty profiling - lifetime income streams, position of children,
the sick and the aged, adequacy of savings, gender;
To address the need for gender perspective in poverty analysis;
To discuss the use of combined data sources for poverty assessments -
merging household surveys and population censuses to construct poverty
maps.
Chapter 7. Global Poverty comparisons (20 pages)
To describe existing approaches to measuring global poverty and to poverty
comparison across countries - method based on the 1 dollar per day per
person; to consider various the sources of variability in the computation
of the international poverty estimates - PPP conversion;
To explore other alternative to the existing approach to international
comparisons of poverty (based on the 1$ per day) such as: are some approaches
more adequate for international comparisons than others? are international
comparisons meaningful when the statistical gap between countries in the
area of poverty statistics is enormous? would it be meaningful or useful
to limit poverty comparisons to countries at a similar level of development?
is the development of common statistical protocols a fruitful strategy
with which to enhance the quality and comparability of both national and
internationally comparable poverty estimates?
Chapter 8. Conclusions and recommendations (10 pages)
To recommend an international action plan to assist countries and international
organizations in responding to the growing demand on poverty statistics;
To recommend the use of a harmonized approach for collecting poverty
data to enable poverty comparisons through time and space;
To suggest a broad agreement on data access for outside researchers (data
repository).
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