"Typical living standards surveys can provide a wealth of information about welfare levels, poverty, and other household and individual characteristics. However, these estimates are necessarily at a high level of aggregation, because such surveys usually include only a few thousand households,...

"The objective of measuring poverty is usually to make comparisons over time or between two or more groups. Common statistical inference methods are used to determine whether an apparent difference in measured poverty is statistically significant. Studies of relative poverty have long recognized...

"The “Cost of Basic Needs” (CBN) approach to drawing consumption-based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence indicates that poverty estimates obtained under the CBN...

"Poverty reduction strategies often highlight public spending to improve health and education, focusing on investments in human capital among poorer members of society. In addition, debt relief programs such as the enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative often require increased...

Poverty measures and profiles are used increasingly to guide antipoverty policies in low-income countries. An essential element in these analyses is the specification of a poverty line. However, there are many different methods for setting poverty lines, and different methods can yield...