Poverty imputation in contexts without consumption data: a revisit with further refinements

Hai-Anh Dang (), Talip Kilic, Kseniya Abanokova and Calogero Carletto

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Survey-to-survey imputation has been increasingly employed to address data gaps for poverty measurement in poorer countries. We refine existing imputation models, using 14 multi-topic household surveys conducted over the past decade in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Vietnam. We find that adding household utility expenditures to a basic imputation model with household-level demographic and employment variables provides accurate estimates, which even fall within one standard error of the true poverty rates in many cases. The proposed imputation method performs better than several commonly used multiple imputation and machine learning techniques. Further adding geospatial variables improves accuracy, as does including additional community-level predictors (available from data in Vietnam) related to educational achievement, poverty, and asset wealth. Yet, within-country spatial heterogeneity exists, with certain models performing well for either urban areas or rural areas only. These results offer cost-saving inputs into future survey design.

Keywords: Ethiopia; Malawi; Nigeria; Tanzania; Vietnam; consumption; household surveys; poverty; Sub-Saharan Africa; survey-to-survey imputation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C15 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2025-02-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-inv, nep-sea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Review of Income and Wealth, 28, February, 2025, 71(1). ISSN: 0034-6586

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/125798/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Poverty Imputation in Contexts without Consumption Data: A Revisit with Further Refinements (2023)
Working Paper: Poverty Imputation in Contexts without Consumption Data: A Revisit with Further Refinements (2023)
Working Paper: Poverty Imputation in Contexts without Consumption Data: A Revisit with Further Refinements (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:125798

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().