Measurement of absolute poverty and indicators of poverty among rural households in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia

Poverty is a widespread and pervasive problem in many parts of the world. Many development programs and projects focus on poverty reduction. A precise targeting of the poor is decisive for their success. Therefore, it seemed necessary to develop a tool or instrument which facilitates the process of selecting this target group, for example absolute poor households.This study aimed to identify sets of indicators for poverty prediction in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Data was collected using two standardised, formal questionnaires from 281 randomly selected households. These questionnaires were a composite questionnaire measuring indicators of poverty and a benchmark questionnaire assessing the daily per capita expenditures. In the analysis two models with different initial sets of indicators and different types of regressions to generate optimal accuracy results were tested. In the first model (Model 1), all variables derived from the composite questionnaire could be possibly included in the model. In the second model (Model 7), only variables which were ranked as easy to verify were included. As to the regression models, ordinary least step regression as well as quantile regressions were used. ...