Tracking Poverty Over Time in the Absence of Comparable Consumption Data

Following the endorsement by the international community of the Millennium Development Goals, there has been an increasing demand for practical methods for steadily tracking poverty. An economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology is explored for doing so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum data requirements for this methodology are the availability of a household budget survey and a series of surveys with a comparable set of asset data also contained in the budget survey. This method is illustrated using a series of Demographic and Health Surveys for Kenya. Copyright The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / <sc>the world bank</sc>. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.