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

Handbook on Poverty Statistics:
Concepts, Methods and Policy Use

Chapter 6. Poverty analysis for national policy use: poverty profiles, mapping and dynamics

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.

(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.)