Poverty Comparisons Over Time and Across Countries in Africa

We use Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to compare “poverty” at two or more points in time within and between African countries. Our welfare measure is an index resulting from a factor analysis of various household characteristics, durables, and household heads’ education. An advantage of this measure is that for intertemporal and intraregional comparisons, we need not rely on suspect price deflators and currency conversion factors. The wide availability and similarity of questionnaires of the DHS facilitate comparisons over both time and countries. Our results generally show declines in poverty during the previous decade, largely due to improvements in rural areas.     

Exploring Alternative Measures of Welfare in the Absence of Expenditure Data

We consider an asset-based alternative to the standard use of expenditures in defining well-being and poverty. Our motivation is to see if there exist simpler and less demanding ways to collect data to measure economic welfare and rank households. This is particularly important in poor regions where there is limited capacity to collect consumption, expenditure and price data. We evaluate an index derived from a factor analysis on household assets using multipurpose surveys from several countries. We find that the asset index is a valid predictor of a crucial manifestation of poverty—child health and nutrition. Indicators of relative measurement error show that the asset index is measured as a proxy for long-term wealth with less error than expenditures. Analysts may thus prefer to use the asset index as an explanatory variable or as a means of mapping economic welfare to other living standards and capabilities such as health and nutrition.     

The "Glass of Milk" Subsidy Program and Malnutrition in Peru

This study of the Vaso de Leche ("Glass of Milk") feeding programin Peru looks for evidence that this in-kind transfer programaimed at young children furthers nutritional objectives. Thestudy links public expenditure data with household survey datato substantiate the targeting and to model the determinantsof nutritional outcomes. It confirms that the social transferprogram targets poor households and households with low nutritionalstatus. Nevertheless, the study fails to find econometric evidencethat the nutritional objectives are being achieved.     

Isolation and agricultural productivity

This article examines the mechanisms that transmit isolation into productivity. In particular, we study the effect of isolation and transport infrastructure on welfare and agricultural productivity in the case of Madagascar. Madagascar is a good case study given the bad shape of its infrastructure and therefore the significant variation in isolation. Based on comprehensive household survey data combined with a census of communes, we discover a strong poverty–isolation relationship. Further we find the inverse relationship between agricultural productivity and isolation to be surprisingly strong. We isolate the following reasons why productivity might decline with isolation: (i) transportation‐induced transaction costs, (ii) the inverse relationship between plot size and productivity, (iii) increasing price variability and extensification onto less fertile land, and (iv) insecurity.     

Tracking Poverty Over Time in the Absence of Comparable Consumption Data

Following the endorsement by the international community ofthe Millennium Development Goals, there has been an increasingdemand for practical methods for steadily tracking poverty.An economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology is exploredfor doing so in the absence of regular, comparable data on householdconsumption. The minimum data requirements for this methodologyare the availability of a household budget survey and a seriesof surveys with a comparable set of asset data also containedin the budget survey. This method is illustrated using a seriesof Demographic and Health Surveys for Kenya.     

Robust Comparisons of Malnutrition in Developing Countries

We use Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to make international and inter–temporal welfare comparisons. While most poverty analyses rely on expenditures or income, we use anthropometric measures of nutrition as indicators of living standards. The advantages are that we observe individual—not household—well–being, deflators and exchange rates are unnecessary, and measurement techniques are similar across surveys. We test the robustness of the headcount results, and find that applying higher order Foster–Greer–Thorbecke poverty measures adds little information; although stochastic dominance testing of nutrition distributions reveals that changes in malnutrition are sensitive to the choice of the "nutrition poverty line."