Methods of household consumption measurement through surveys: Experimental results from Tanzania

Beegle, Kathleen; Weerdt, Joachim De; Friedman, Jed; Gibson, John

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2011.11.001

Cited by 334 publications

(345 citation statements)

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“…Such differences in household survey questionnaires over time (and between countries) result in limited comparability in consumption and absolute poverty levels (see, e.g., Beegle et al 2012, andJolliffe 2001). This is true whether the differences is in how the survey is administered (for example, diary or enumerated), the extensiveness of the survey (short but comprehensive list of items compared to long list of items), the recall period (for example, 7-day compared to 14-day), or time of interview (for example, whether in the lean or harvest season).…”

Section: Individual-level Welfare Measures From Household Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues, methodology and initial results

et al. 2016

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The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the World Bank's international poverty line. In revising the line, we have sought to minimize changes to the real purchasing power of the earlier $1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs), so as to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Bank's twin goals -which were set with respect to that line. In particular, the new line was obtained by inflating the same fifteen national poverty lines -originally used by Ravallion et al. In combination with other changes described in the paper, this revision leads to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence for 2011: from 14.5 % using the old method to 14.1 % using the new method. In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 % of the world's population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats and limitations of the approach taken. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

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Section: Individual-level Welfare Measures From Household Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues, methodology and initial results

et al. 2016

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“…Second, the international poverty line is invariant in space and time 2 and thus constitutes an absolute poverty line that tries to capture the share of people who are in extreme poverty where basic 1 For a discussion, see, for example, Sen (1982), , Beegle et al 2012, and Klasen (2000. 2 The poverty line is adjusted only for differences in prices across space and time.…”

Section: The World Bank's International Poverty Measure and Its Assummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are many detailed measurement questions such as the consistency of household surveys between countries and over time (e.g. Beegle et al 2012;World Bank, 2015), as well as the consistency of income or consumption information in household surveys with the same information in national accounts. Using national accounts mean consumption instead of survey means would generally suggest lower 3 Most of the background papers by the World Bank team working on these numbers usually also prepare figures that consider the depth and severity of poverty.…”

Section: The World Bank's International Poverty Measure and Its Assummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also here, the devil is in the detail as has been shown in Deaton and Kozel (2005) who survey the great debates on poverty in India where these issues are the centre of the debate. Also, Beegle et al (2012) experiment with different ways to generate food consumption data from households (including short and long lists of items, diary and recall methods) and find that they yield dramatically different results, pointing to the need for strict quality control as well as consistency across countries. In particular, the issue of measurement error and incomparability of survey instruments (and survey implementation) across countries and time are the most serious empirical drawbacks of moving to such an approach to measuring global poverty.…”

Section: A Quick Fix and A Longer-term Alternativementioning

confidence: 99%

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International income poverty measurement: which way now?

et al. 2016

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Stephan Klasen*, Tatyana Krivobokova*, Friederike Greb**, Rahul Lahoti*, Syamsul Hidayat Pasaribu***, and Manuel Wiesenfarth**** August, 2015 Terms of use: Documents in AbstractIn this paper, we critically review conceptual and empirical issues surrounding the derivation of the international poverty line, expressed in PPP-adjusted dollars and linked to various rounds of the International Comparison of Prices (ICP). We find that there are some limitations in the current estimation of these lines, but show that statistically superior methods lead to lines that are relatively robust and confirm the $1.25 using 2005PPPs and suggest $1.67-1.71 using 2011PPPs; they also roughly confirm the current shape of the proposed 'weakly relative' poverty line. Using the new absolute line using 2011 PPPs would lead to substantially lower poverty in our estimation. The extent of the decline depends on whether and how one treats China, India, and Indonesia differently from other countries in the 2005 and 2011 PPPs. More seriously, we note that the dependence on the conceptual and empirical problems associated with the link to successive ICP rounds creates problems that have gotten worse over time so that we suggest that it would be best to consider alternatives to the current reliance on ICP rounds and the resulting PPPs. As a quick fix we propose to fix the international poverty line in national currencies using either the 2005 or 2011 level; in the medium term, we argue for global poverty measurement based on internationally coordinated national poverty measurement.

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“…The sensitivity of hunger estimates to survey design variations is greater than for other statistics derived from HCES, such as poverty counts and inequality measures (Beegle et al 2012). One reason for this is that surveys differ the most in the ways that they go about measuring food consumption, whereas modules devoted to non-food consumption tend to be more standardized.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

The Challenge of Measuring Hunger through Survey

Weerdt

Beegle²,

Friedman³

et al. 2016

Economic Development and Cultural Change

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There is widespread interest in estimating the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for calculating hunger numbers directly from these same surveys. For either approach, embedded in this effort are a number of important details about how household surveys are designed and how these data are then used. Using a survey experiment in Tanzania, this study finds great fragility in hunger counts stemming from alternative survey designs. As a consequence, comparable hunger numbers will be lacking until more effort is made to either harmonize survey designs or better understand the consequences of survey design variation. JEL Codes: C88, O12, Q18

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Methods of household consumption measurement through surveys: Experimental results from Tanzania

Cited by 334 publications

References 24 publications

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues, methodology and initial results

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues, methodology and initial results

International income poverty measurement: which way now?

The Challenge of Measuring Hunger through Survey

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