We broadly review the challenges encountered and choices made in the national assessments of consumption poverty using the 1996/97, 2002/03, and 2008/09 budget surveys. Efforts to maintain consistency with the previous survey imply that prior choices tend to be adopted in subsequent analyses....

The poverty mapping methodology for estimating welfare rankings from small areas has proven to be useful in guiding allocation of government funds, regional planning, and general policy formulation. Nevertheless, poverty mapping also suffers from a series of by now well recognized shortcomings....

We explore a novel first order dominance (FOD) approach to poverty mapping and compare its properties to small area estimation. The FOD approach uses census data directly; is straightforward to implement; is multidimensional allowing for a broad conception of welfare; and accounts rigorously for...

This paper provides practical tests for the robustness of multidimensional comparisons of well-being. Focussing on counting-type multidimensional poverty measures, I draw on the properties of positive Boolean threshold functions to prove that the space of feasible poverty definitions is finite...

In the widely used class of multidimensional poverty measures introduced by Alkire and Foster (2011), dimension-specific weights combined with a single cut-off parameter play a fundamental role in identifying who is multidimensionally poor. This paper revisits how these parameters are...