Estimating Poverty Rates in Target Populations

The performance of the Simple Poverty Scorecard is compared against the performance of established regression-based estimators. All estimates are benchmarked against observed poverty status based on household expenditure (or income) data from household socioeconomic surveys that span nearly a decade and are representative of subnational populations. When the models all adopt the same "one-size-fits-all" training approach, there is no meaningful difference in performance and the Simple Poverty Scorecard is as good as any of the regression-based estimators. The findings change, however, when the regression-based estimators are "trained" on "training sets" that more closely resemble potential subpopulation test sets. In this case, regression-based models outperform the nationally calculated Simple Poverty Scorecard in terms of bias and variance. These findings highlight the fundamental trade-off between simplicity of use and accuracy.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Diamond, Alexis, Gill, Michael, Rebolledo Dellepiane, Miguel, Skoufias, Emmanuel, Vinha, Katja, Xu, Yiqing
Format:	Working Paper biblioteca
Language:	English en_US
Published:	World Bank, Washington, DC 2016-08
Subjects:	simple poverty scorecard, PPI, headcount poverty rate,
Online Access:	http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2016/08/26695758/estimating-poverty-rates-target-populations-assessment-simple-poverty-scorecard-alternative-approaches https://hdl.handle.net/10986/25038
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