While household well-being derives from long-term average rates of consumption, welfare comparisons typically rely on shorter-duration survey measurements. We develop a new strategy to identify the distribution of these long-term rates by leveraging a large-scale randomization in Iraq that...

We explore a novel first order dominance (FOD) approach to poverty mapping and compare its properties to small area estimation. The FOD approach uses census data directly; is straightforward to implement; is multidimensional allowing for a broad conception of welfare; and accounts rigorously for...

"Nachhaltige Energie für alle" – auf diesen Namen tauften die Vereinten Nationen und Weltbank jüngst eine Initiative, die den weltweiten Zugang zu modernen Energieformen fördern soll. Die allgemeine Überwindung des Mangels an verlässlicher und sauberer Energie, u.a. in Form von...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally repre- sentative household budget or income surveys, while there often are urban household surveys as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This...

Recent validation studies show that survey misreporting is pervasive and biases common analyses. Addressing this problem is further complicated, because validation data are usually convenience samples and access is restricted, making them more suitable to document than to solve the problem. I...

With the ‘Sustainable Energy for All' initiative led by the UN and World Bank, the provision of access to modern energy has recently been brought to the top of the international development agenda. However, there is yet little guidance on how to measure modern energy access or its deprivation,...

Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum...

The poverty mapping methodology for estimating welfare rankings from small areas has proven to be useful in guiding allocation of government funds, regional planning, and general policy formulation. Nevertheless, poverty mapping also suffers from a series of by now well recognized shortcomings....

We examine the consequences of underreporting of transfer programs in household survey data for several prototypical analyses of low-income populations. We focus on the Current Population Survey (CPS), the source of official poverty and inequality statistics. We link administrative data for food...

Poverty in low-income countries is usually measured with large and infrequent household surveys. A challenge is to find methods to measure poverty more frequently. The objective of this study is to test a method for predicting poverty, based upon a statistical model utilizing consumption surveys...