Accuracy Analysis ofParticipatory Wealth Ranking (PWR)in Socio-economic Poverty Comparisons

This paper1 describes Participatory Wealth Ranking’s (PWR) accuracy in predicting the poverty status of groups identified by socio-economic indicators. On the basis of a census in 8 villages located in three of the six divisions of Bangladesh, 1660 households were scored using the Participatory Wealth Ranking (PWR) method. A randomly selected sub-sample of 320 households was further interviewed using an LSMS-type questionnaire. Based on four main socio-economic descriptors, our findings reveal Balanced Poverty Accuracy Criterion (BPAC) values above -7% and below 33% if the PWR tool is defined at the national level by the cut-off score of 86.67. However, for some socio-economic categories comprising 100 households or more, a special calibration to set up a second-step tool type was carried out to improve accuracy performance....