This paper examines the quality of data collected in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, which is the source for the Consumer Price Index weights and is the main source of U.S. consumption microdata. We compare reported spending on a large number of categories of goods and services to...

We estimate intergenerational poverty persistence in Indonesia using a panel dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study looking at the issue in the Indonesian context. Different from the majority of studies on this issue, we include controls for several household and...

This paper assesses the effect of public and private sector growth on poverty in Indonesia. We use fixed capital formation growth as the proxy for the private sector and growth in government spending as the indicator of the public sector. We find that growth in both sectors significantly reduces...

This report documents the results of a pilot project on a new poverty monitoring system that improves the current system in three areas. First, it involves the locals in monitoring poverty in their own area. Second, the poverty indicators are sensitive to local conditions, accurate, and cannot...

Although consumption expenditure data is crucial for assessing the level of peoples welfare and calculating important welfare measures such as the poverty headcount rate, collecting such data requires significant time and effort. In this study, we experiment with three approaches to predict...

We estimate intergenerational poverty persistence in Indonesia using a panel dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such study looking at the issue in the Indonesian context. Different from the majority of studies on this issue, we include controls for several household and...

This study extends the literature on the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction by differentiating growth and poverty into their sectoral compositions and locations. We find that growth in the rural services sector reduces poverty in all sectors and locations. However, in...

We discuss poverty measurement, focusing on two alternatives to the current official measure: consumption poverty, and the Census Bureau's new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that was released for the first time last year. The SPM has advantages over the official poverty measure, including a...

In the U.S., analyses of poverty rates and the effects of anti-poverty programs rely almost exclusively on income data. In earlier work (Meyer and Sullivan, 2003) we emphasized that conceptual arguments generally favor using consumption data to measure the well-being of the poor, and, on...

This paper investigates how material well-being has changed over time for those at the bottom of the distributions of income and consumption. We document the sharp differences between recent trends in measured income and consumption, focusing on families headed by a single mother. Since the...