Panel Meeting on

Global Poverty Measures and
International Poverty Comparison

New York, Tuesday 3 February 2004 – 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

UN Secretariat Building, Conference room 5

Organized by
the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) of the
Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA)

Keynote Speaker
José Antonio Ocampo, Under-Secretary-General, DESA

Chair
Willem de Vries, Officer in Charge, UNSD

Panelists

The panel will be comprised of distinguished professors and reputable international experts:

Jonathan Morduch, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics, NYU.
His research focuses on poverty and inequality, and has developed tools for measuring vulnerability, decomposing inequality, and relating poverty reduction to growth processes.
Prof. Morduch is Chair of the Steering Committee that oversees the UN project on poverty statistics.

Sanjay Reddy, Assistant Professor of Economics, Columbia University. His areas of work include development economics, international economics, economics and philosophy, and economics and social theory. Prof. Reddy has co-authored with Dr. Thomas Pogge, Associate Professor in Philosophy at Columbia University, the paper “How Not to Count the Poor”.

Michael Ward, former Principal Economist of the World Bank. Dr. Ward is presently an International Consultant at IMF and for the UN Intellectual History Project. He is also member of the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UNDP Human Development Report.

Ivo Havinga is Chief of the Economic Statistics Branch at the United Nations Statistics Division
His areas of work include national accounting, international trade in services, international economic and social classifications and environmental accounting.

For further information, please contact:
Gisele Kamanou, Office of the Director, UNSD
Tel: 212- 963 4328
Email: kamanou@un.org

Contextual Overview:

The Statistics Division has recently launched a project to prepare a handbook on Poverty Statistics: Concepts, Methods and Policy Use. The purpose of the handbook will be to assist countries in designing and implementing a system of poverty measurements that satisfy at the same time their national policy needs as well as the increasing international demand for poverty statistics and related data. A steering committee on poverty statistics consisting of 10 eminent experts has been established to guide the process of the preparation of the handbook. Further background information can be found at the project website at http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/poverty/default.htm.

The problem of monitoring global poverty, in particular, is one of the most crucial development issues facing international policy makers. At present, the “dollar per day” measure is the key indicator for monitoring global poverty and its change over time. However, the current debate on global poverty has raised some fundamental questions regarding the first Millennium Development Goals target, that is, halving the number of people living under one dollar per day. For example, one important question that has been raised by countries, is to understand the links between national and global poverty estimates.

The problems are methodological as well as statistical and both are intricately linked. It is hoped that your discussion will help to explore possible intermediate solutions to the technical limitations of the current international poverty measures. In particular, I would like to invite you to react to two proposed specific alternatives to the current approach to international poverty comparisons namely, poverty-specific PPP’s and a harmonized approach to measuring household consumption expenditures from household survey and national accounts.

UNSD has organized this panel discussion on Global Poverty measures and International Poverty Comparison in order to explore possible intermediate solutions to the technical limitations of the current international poverty measure. The panelists will discuss alternatives for counting the poor and possible solutions to the limitations of the current global poverty measure. They will be invited also to react to two proposed specific alternatives to the current approach to international poverty comparisons namely, poverty-specific PPP’s and a harmonized approach to measuring household consumption expenditures from household survey and national accounts.

Notes on the talks

Jonathan Morduch will give a brief presentation the UNSD ongoing project on the preparation of a handbook on poverty measurement and will moderate the meeting.

Sanjay Reddy will discuss an alternative to the current 'money-metric' approach to undertaking inter-country poverty comparison. The proposed alternative explicitly focuses on the basic requirements of human beings, such as adequate nutrition.

Michael Ward will discuss conceptual issues and statistical concerns that justify favoring a distributional approach to the analysis of poverty based on indicators and the aggregation of national and regional level statistics rather than individual country data.

Ivo Havinga will discuss the reconciliation of the main current sources of data for povery estimates, namely the household surveys and the national accounts. He will discuss in particular the feasbility and international applicability of a harmonized tool for the collection of micro data and will present some technical constraints to such approach.