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"Poverty Developing countries Measurement."
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The World Bank Research Observer 16(2)
Counting the world's poor: problems and possible solutions; by Angus Deaton. Comments on \"counting the world's poor\"; by Martin Ravallion, and T. N. Srinivasan. Ecology, history, and development : a perspective from rural Southeast Asia; by Yujiro Hayami. Productivity growth and sustainability in post-green revolution agriculture: the case of the Indian and Pakistan Punjab; by Rinku Murgai, Mubarik Ali, and Derek Byerlee. The politics of Russian enterprise reform: insiders, local governments, and the obstacles to restructuring; by Raj M. Desai and Itzhak Goldberg.
Journal
The Developing World is Poorer than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty
A new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world. We find that 25% of the population lived in poverty in 2005, as judged by what “poverty” typically means in the world's poorest countries. This is higher than past estimates. Substantial overall progress is still indicated—the corresponding poverty rate was 52% in 1981—but progress was very uneven across regions. The trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology, though precise counts are more sensitive.
Journal Article
Universal Basic Incomes versus Targeted Transfers
Of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals articulated by the United Nations, number one is the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030. While future economic growth should continue to reduce poverty, it will not solve the problem by itself; thus, there is a potentially important role for national-level transfer programs that assist poor families in developing countries. Such programs are often run by developing country governments. Many countries have implemented transfer programs that seek to target beneficiaries: that is, to identify who is poor and then to restrict transfers to those individuals. Some people have begun to advocate for “universal basic income” programs, which dispense with trying to identify the poor and instead provide transfers to everyone. We begin by considering the universal basic income as part of the solution to an optimal income-taxation problem, focusing on the case of developing countries, where there is limited income data and inclusion in the formal tax system is low. We examine how the targeting of transfer programs is conducted in these settings, and provide empirical evidence on the tradeoffs involved between universal basic income and targeted transfer schemes using data from Indonesia and Peru—two countries that run nationwide transfer programs that are targeted to the poor. We conclude by linking our findings back to the broader policy debate on what tools should be preferred for redistribution, as well as the practical challenges of administering them in developing countries.
Journal Article
Effect of Financial Inclusion on Poverty and Vulnerability to Poverty: Evidence Using a Multidimensional Measure of Financial Inclusion
This study examines the effect of financial inclusion on poverty and vulnerability to poverty of Ghanaian households. Using data extracted from the seventh round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey in 2016/17, a multiple correspondence analysis is employed to generate a financial inclusion index, and three-stage feasible least squares is used to estimate households’ vulnerability to poverty. Endogeneity associated with financial inclusion is resolved using distance to the nearest bank as an instrument in an instrumental variables probit technique. Results showed that while 23.4% of Ghanaians are considered poor, about 51% are vulnerable to poverty. We found that an increase in financial inclusion has two effects on household poverty. First, it is associated with a decline in a household’s likelihood of being poor by 27%. Second, it prevents a household’s exposure to future poverty by 28%. Female-headed households have a greater chance of experiencing a larger reduction in poverty and vulnerability to poverty through enhanced financial inclusion than do male-headed households. Furthermore, financial inclusion reduces poverty and vulnerability to poverty more in rural than in urban areas. Governments are encouraged to design or enhance policies that provide an enabling environment for the private sector to innovate and expand financial services to more distant places. Government investment in, and regulation of, the mobile money industry will be a necessary step to enhancing financial inclusion in developing countries.
Journal Article
Microestimates of wealth for all low- and middle-income countries
Many critical policy decisions, from strategic investments to the allocation of humanitarian aid, rely on data about the geographic distribution of wealth and poverty. Yet many poverty maps are out of date or exist only at very coarse levels of granularity. Here we develop microestimates of the relative wealth and poverty of the populated surface of all 135 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) at 2.4 km resolution. The estimates are built by applying machine-learning algorithms to vast and heterogeneous data from satellites, mobile phone networks, and topographic maps, as well as aggregated and deidentified connectivity data from Facebook. We train and calibrate the estimates using nationally representative household survey data from 56 LMICs and then validate their accuracy using four independent sources of household survey data from 18 countries. We also provide confidence intervals for each microestimate to facilitate responsible downstream use. These estimates are provided free for public use in the hope that they enable targeted policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, provide the foundation for insights into the causes and consequences of economic development and growth, and promote responsible policymaking in support of sustainable development.
Journal Article
Poverty alleviation in rural China: policy changes, future challenges and policy implications
Purpose
Poverty alleviation is a global challenge. Human society has never ceased to fight against poverty. China was once the developing country with the largest rural poor population in the world. Remarkable achievements have been made in China’s antipoverty program over the past decades, shaping a unique poverty reduction strategy with Chinese characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to first review the history of China’s rural reform and antipoverty, and then analyze the related policy systems, mechanism innovations and future challenges in poverty alleviation and development. At last, some specific policy implications were provided.
Design/methodology/approach
Literature on China’s antipoverty history was reviewed and mechanism innovations on targeted poverty alleviation strategy were investigated.
Findings
Along with the deepening of the rural reform, the poverty alleviation and development in new China have undergone six stages, and experienced a transformation from relief-oriented to development-oriented poverty alleviation. The object of poverty alleviation has gradually targeted with a transformation from poor counties/areas to villages/households, and the effectiveness of poverty alleviation is also gradually improved. However, the increase in the difficulty of antipoverty, fragile ecological environment, rapid population aging and rural decline poses challenges to the construction of a well-off society in an all-round way in China. Specific antipoverty measures were put forward based on the investigation. Finally, the authors emphasize the importance of strengthening the study of poverty geography.
Originality/value
This study investigates the history of China’s antipoverty policy and analyzes the future challenges for implementing targeted poverty alleviation policy. These findings will lay a foundation for the formulation of China’s antipoverty policies after 2020, and provide experience for poverty alleviation in other developing countries around the world.
Journal Article
The International Wealth Index (IWI)
This paper presents the International Wealth Index (IWI), the first comparable asset based index of household's material well-being, or economic status, that can be used for all low and middle income countries. IWI is similar to the widely used wealth indices included in the Demographic and Health Surveys and UNICEF MICS surveys, but adds the property of comparability across place and time. IWI is based on data from 2.1 million households in 97 developing countries. With IWI we provide a stable and understandable yardstick for evaluating and comparing the situation of households, social groups and societies among all regions of the developing world. A household's ranking on IWI indicates to what extent the household possesses a basic set of assets, valued highly by people across the globe. IWI is tested thoroughly and turns out to be a stable index that hardly depends on the inclusion of specific items or on data for specific regions or time periods. National IWI values are highly correlated with human development, life expectancy, and national income, and IWI-based poverty measures with poverty headcount ratios.
Journal Article
Urban–rural Integration and Poverty: Different Roles of Urban–rural Integration in Reducing Rural and Urban Poverty in China
Poverty is a common problem faced by all countries. Breaking the restrictions on urban–rural development imposed by the dual urban–rural system, China has greatly succeeded in eradicating absolute poverty, which has important reference significance for other developing countries to reduce poverty. However, few studies have systematically and empirically tested the heterogeneous impact of urban–rural integration (URI) on urban and rural poverty reduction. Using China’s provincial panel data and the spatial econometric model, this study explores the relationship between URI and poverty reduction and tests its spatial spillover effects. The results show that URI and rural poverty present an inverted U-shaped relationship, which first aggravates and subsequently alleviates rural poverty. That has spatial overflow. For urban poverty, URI first reduces and then increases urban poverty in the province. In contrast, URI and urban poverty have an inverted U-shaped relationship in the surrounding province. By calculating the inflection point value, this study finds that when the URI level is between 0.300 and 0.480, URI can contribute to urban and rural poverty reduction in the local and surrounding areas. In the future, the government should dynamically monitor changes in urban and rural poverty while improving the development of URI.
Journal Article
LIGHTS, CAMERA . . . INCOME! ILLUMINATING THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS-HOUSEHOLD SURVEYS DEBATE
GDP per capita and household survey means present conflicting pictures of the rate of economic development in emerging countries. One of the areas in which the national accounts–household surveys debate is key is the measurement of developing world poverty. We propose a data-driven method to assess the relative quality of GDP per capita and survey means by comparing them to the evolution of satellite-recorded nighttime lights. Our main assumption, which is robust to a variety of specification checks, is that the measurement error in nighttime lights is unrelated to the measurement errors in either national accounts or survey means. We obtain estimates of weights on national accounts and survey means in an optimal proxy for true income; these weights are very large for national accounts and very modest for survey means. We conclusively reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is greater than the optimal weight on national accounts, and we generally fail to reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is zero. Additionally, we provide evidence that national accounts are good indicators of desirable outcomes for the poor (such as longer life expectancy, better education and access to safe water), and we show that surveys appear to perform worse in developing countries that are richer and that are growing faster. Therefore, we interpret our results as providing support for estimates of world poverty that are based on national accounts.
Journal Article