We construct and derive the properties of an estimator of welfarewhich takes advantage of the detailed nature of information about living standards available in small household surveys and the comprehensive coverage of a census. By combining the strengths of each, our estimator can be used at a...

Little research currently exists on a vulnerability line that distinguishes the poor population from the population that is not poor but that still faces significant risk of falling back into poverty. This paper attempts to fill this gap by proposing vulnerability lines that can be...

Important differences exist between communities with respect to their needs, capacities, and circumstances. As central governments are not able to discern these differences fully, they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information....

This paper assembles data at the all-India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence, of the non-farm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined National Sample Survey and...

This paper examines the performance small area of welfare estimation. The method combines census and survey data to produce spatially disaggregated poverty and inequality estimates. To test the method, predicted welfare indicators for a set of target populations are compared with their true...

Standard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these...