This paper presents axiomatic arguments to make the case for distribution-sensitive multidimensional poverty measures. The commonly-used counting measures violate the strong transfer axiom which requires regressive transfers to be unambiguously poverty-increasing and they are also invariant to...

Centralized targeting registries are increasingly used to allocate social assistance benefits in developing countries. There are two key design issues that matter for targeting accuracy: (i) which households to survey for inclusion in the registry and (ii) how to rank surveyed households. The...

To assess the conventional view that assets uniformly improve childhood development through wealth effects, this paper tests whether different types of assets have different effects on child education. The analysis indicates that household durables and housing quality have the expected positive...

Household consumption surveys do not typically cover refugee populations, and poverty estimates for refugees are rare. This paper tests the performance of cross-survey imputation methods to estimate poverty for a sample of refugees in Chad, by combining United Nations High Commissioner for...

Decades of conflict have contributed to high flows of internal displacement in Iraq. The incidence of these flows on the welfare of internally displaced persons is not well understood. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the link between internal displacement...

The challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades, but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This paper first proposes a class of simple, intuitive...

This paper discusses the challenges associated with collecting time-use data in developing countries. The paper suggests potential solutions, concentrating on the two most common time-use methods used in development settings: stylized questions and time diaries. The paper identifies a...

Poverty estimates usually lag behind two years, which makes it difficult to provide real-time poverty analysis to assess the impact of economic crisis and shocks among the less well-off, and subsequently limits policy responses. This paper takes advantage of up-to-date average economic welfare...

Multidimensional poverty comparisons can be sensitive to the choice of welfare indicators, the weights assigned to the indicators, as well as the aggregate poverty measure used. This paper examines the robustness of trends in multidimensional poverty in the Philippines to these choices by...

The dramatic expansion of mobile phone use in developing countries has given rise to a rich and largely untapped source of information about the characteristics of communities and regions. Call Detail Records (CDRs) obtained from cellular phones provide highly granular real-time data that can be...