Estimating Poverty for Refugee Populations: Can Cross-Survey Imputation Methods Substitute for Data Scarcity?

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Data Scarcity and Poverty Measurement

“…However, this task is challenged by the fact that these populations are scattered in hard-to-reach places and are not commonly included in the sampling frame of the host countries. Recent studies suggest that a judicious combination of household consumption surveys, administrative data and imputation methods can provide poverty estimates for refugees (Beltramo et al, 2020;Dang and Verme, 2021).…”

Poverty Imputation in Contexts without Consumption Data: A Revisit with Further Refinements

“…Dang and Lanjouw, 2018;Dang et al, 2019). Another recent application of this method is to provide poverty estimates for the Syrian refugees in Jordan (Dang and Verme, 2021) or the various refugee populations in Chad (Beltramo et al, 2020). 6 Finally, regarding variable selection for imputation models, the variables that are found to work well typically include household assets and housing characteristics, with some inconclusive evidence regarding predictors that capture sub-components of household consumption (Christiaensen et al, 2012;Dang et al, 2019).…”

Estimating Poverty among Refugee Populations: A Cross-Survey Imputation Exercise for Chad

“…Newhouse et al (2014) and offer recent summaries of previous imputation studies that highlight the main advantages, debate different approaches, and provide useful insights about welfare imputation practices. More recently, Dang and Verme (2019) is the first study to propose the use of a cross-survey imputation method in the context of the Syrian refugees living in Jordan, using survey and administrative data provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Their findings suggest that in the absence of actual household consumption survey data, their cross-survey imputation method can provide a secondbest alternative to address the data challenge.…”

“…The results were similar except the larger estimate variances (less precision), which might be due to sample size for refugees from the Central African Republic. 9 See, for example,Dang et al (2017a);Dang and Lanjouw (2018);Dang and Verme (2019). See alsoLuca et al (2018) for a related study on variable selection with linear models.…”