Guidelines for Constructing Consumption Aggregates for Welfare Analysis.

In recent years, in much of the World Bank's operational work as well as in applied research, consumption aggregates constructed from survey data have been used to measure poverty, to analyse changes in living standards, over time, and to assess the distributional impacts of various programs and policies. This paper seeks to fill the gap by providing a brief theoretical introduction followed by practical advice on how to construct a consumption aggregate from household survey data.