In their productive capacity, assets generate income and facilitate access to capital and credit. In the face of shocks, they enhance the ability to diversify income and alleviate liquidity constraints (Hulme and Shepherd, 2003; Carter and Barrett, 2006). Ownership of, and control over assets is a key input into individual empowerment and the related micro data constitute an essential input into extensive economic research focused on intra-household bargaining outcomes and their impact on household and individual welfare. Underlying these sub-optimal approaches to individual level data collection, in particular the use of proxy respondents that overlooks information asymmetries within households, is the lack of technical guidelines on questionnaire design and respondent selection protocols that properly capture individual-level ownership of, and rights to assets. In a world of imperfect and scarce data, the absence of these recommended practices fuels the prevalence of myths regarding women's asset ownership and contributes to the inability to clearly articulate policy responses to inequalities faced by women and men (Doss and others, 2015). The provision of these guidelines, anchored in solid methodological research, would in turn improve the collection of household survey data facilitating better socioeconomic research focused on personal wealth and its distribution. The MEXA design was informed by the recommendations of the EDGE Follow-up Meeting on Measuring Asset Ownership from a Gender Perspective that was held on November 21-22, 2013 with participation from the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the UN Women, World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), UBOS and Yale University. A review of the survey instruments and protocols linked to the Gender Asset Gap Project, Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), Demographic and Health Surveys, and Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) initiative was important for distilling the prominent approaches to respondent selection in household surveys across the developing world
