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| Contributor | K.E.Vaidyanathan |
| Title of paper | Statistics of Poverty Monitoring in Developing Countries |
| Abstract | The alleviation of poverty has taken the centre-stage in the development plans of developing countries, and in the programmes of international agencies. This has resulted in the need to collect, compile and analyse the statistics required for monitoring and analysis of poverty on a regular basis. First and foremost, data are needed to measure vulnerability and dependency; Secondly, there is need to develop both monetary and non-monetary indicators of poverty for the different sub-groups of the population; Thirdly, statistics are needed to measure the impact of programmes for poverty alleviation. This paper presents the different approaches adopted for compiling such statistics and how these can be improved. Introduction: There is increasing need to collect, compile and analyse statistics needed for measuring poverty for formulation of programmes for alleviation of poverty and to monitor changes in the situation arising from their implementation. The measures used are essentially of two categories (i) monetary measures based on income or consumption (ii) non monetary measures based on access to services or social outcomes such as education, health and basic amenities such as water supply, sanitation etc. Method of data collection: A combination of different approaches to data collection is widely adopted, depending upon the statistical system. The administrative records of education, health, water supply and sanitary services provides information on the extent of availability of these services, while household surveys such as Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) and Household Budget Survey (HBS) provide information on both monetary and non-monetary measures. The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey of UNICEF and qualitative surveys also provide useful information Limitations: Poverty is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and calls for a variety of indicators to identify the poor and their varying needs. There are unresolved issues concerning the unit of measurement, choice of the appropriate poverty line, valuation of income/consumption (in the case of monetary measures), definition of basic needs (for non-monetary indicators) etc, besides the issues such as frequency of data collection, sampling and non-sampling errors, seasonality etc which affect the statistics collected. |
| Full document | Statistics of Poverty Monitoring in Developing Countries |
This page last revised: Friday, 17 May 2002
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