Poverty Mapping in El Salvador

Abstract

Third-party content-The World Bank does not necessarily own each component of the content contained within the work. The World Bank therefore does not warrant that the use of any third-party-owned individual component or part contained in the work will not infringe on the rights of those third parties. The risk of claims resulting from such infringement rests solely with you. If you wish to re-use a component of the work, it is your responsibility to determine whether permission is needed for that re-use and to obtain permission from the copyright owner. Examples of components can include, but are not limited to, tables, Figures, or images. This report presents poverty maps at the municipality level based on the Fay-Herriot model for small-area estimations. Direct estimates of poverty indicators at the municipality level rely on information generated from household surveys. Often, though, household surveys are not representative at disaggregated levels, such as municipalities. Consequently, small sample sizes limit their precision and estimates cannot be obtained for out-of-sample domains. Due to this, we resort to small-area estimation techniques, which rely on several data sources to improve the precision of survey-based direct estimates. For the case of El Salvador, we use data from the last available Population Census conducted in 2007 and the 2019 household survey (Encuesta de Hogares de Propositos Multiples, EHPM). We also draw from population projections at the municipality level, as El Salvador is subject to high emigration rates. Many methodologies for poverty mapping require that reference years of the data sources used as a basis for small area estimations are as close to each other as possible. Due to the fact that the last available census is from 2007, we decided to use small area