Poverty mapping of romanian counties using cluster analysis

Poverty mapping plays a very important role in giving a visual representation of the intensity of poverty incidence by geographic area. This study tries to group Romanian counties taking into account several indicators that describe the various dimensions of poverty. The method used for grouping is cluster analysis. The main objective of this paper is to show how poverty mapping using cluster analysis can be employed as a tool to identify homogenous poverty clusters of counties and help to reduce poverty by necessary resource allocation. Thus, the policy-makers can easily detect the most poverty affected areas and the poverty's specific in these areas and can be guided to target the poor for the best resource allocation to alleviate poverty.