To impute or not to impute, and how? A review of alternative poverty estimation methods in the context of unavailable consumption data

Hai-Anh Dang ()

No 507, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: There is an increasingly stronger demand for more frequent and accurate poverty estimates, despite the oftentimes unavailable household consumption data. We review imputation methods that have been employed to provide poverty estimates in such data-scarce contexts. These range from estimates on a non-monetary basis, estimates for specific project targeting or tracking trends at the national level, to estimates at a more disaggregated level, and estimates of poverty dynamics. We provide a concise synthesis, which serves as an introduction to the literature. We focus on intuition and practical insights that highlight existing methods’ nuanced differences rather than their technical aspects.

Keywords: poverty; imputation; consumption; wealth index; synthetic panels; household survey. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C15 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2019-507.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:inq:inqwps:ecineq2019-507

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).