Poverty comparisons--an increasingly important starting-point for welfare policy analysis--are almost always based on household surveys. Therefore they require that one be able to distinguish underlying differences in the populations being compared from sampling variation: standard errors must...

Poverty rates calculated on the basis of household consumption expenditures are routinely compared across countries and time. The surveys which underlie these comparisons typically differ in the types of food and non-food expenditures included, often in ways which are easily overlooked by...