Describing Patterns of Socio-Economic Development at Fine Spatial and Temporal Resolutions

Bansal, Chahat

doi:10.1145/3371158.3371214

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…1. An interesting exception is Bansal (2020) who demonstrates temporal transferability of a simple machine learning model applied to satellite data to estimate the evolution of a district level development index (akin to the Human Development Index) using temporal satellite data as input.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should Consumption Sub-Aggregates be used to Measure Poverty?

Christiaensen¹,

Ligon²,

Sohnesen³

2020

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Frequent measurement of poverty is challenging, as measurement often relies on complex and expensive expenditure surveys that try to measure expenditures on a comprehensive consumption aggregate. This paper investigates the use of consumption "sub-aggregates" instead. The use of consumption subaggregates is theoretically justified if and only if all Engel curves are linear for any realization of prices. This is very stringent. However, it may be possible to empirically identify certain goods that happen to have linear Engel curves given prevailing prices, and when the effect of price changes is small, such a sub-aggregate might work in practice. The paper constructs such linear sub-aggregates using data from Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. The findings show that using sub-aggregates is ill-advised in practice as well as in theory. This raises questions about the consistency of the poverty tracking efforts currently applied across countries, since obtaining exhaustive consumption measures remains an unmet challenge.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Should Consumption Sub-Aggregates be used to Measure Poverty?

Christiaensen¹,

Ligon²,

Sohnesen³

2020

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Consumption Subaggregates Should Not Be Used to Measure Poverty

Christiaensen¹,

Ligon

Sohnesen³

2021

The World Bank Economic Review

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Frequent measurement of poverty is challenging because measurement often relies on complex and expensive expenditure surveys that try to measure expenditures on a comprehensive consumption aggregate. This paper investigates the use of consumption “subaggregates” instead. The use of consumption subaggregates is theoretically justified if and only if all Engel curves are linear for any realization of prices. This is very stringent. However, it may be possible to empirically identify certain goods that happen to have linear Engel curves given prevailing prices, and when the effect of price changes is small, such a subaggregate might work in practice. The paper constructs such linear subaggregates using data from Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. The findings show that using subaggregates is ill advised in practice as well as in theory. This also raises questions about the consistency of the poverty tracking efforts currently applied across countries, since obtaining exhaustive consumption measures remains an unmet challenge.

show abstract

Describing Patterns of Socio-Economic Development at Fine Spatial and Temporal Resolutions

Cited by 2 publications

References 3 publications

Should Consumption Sub-Aggregates be used to Measure Poverty?

Should Consumption Sub-Aggregates be used to Measure Poverty?

Consumption Subaggregates Should Not Be Used to Measure Poverty

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