Poverty Measurement Training: Monitoring Poverty and Inequality in Developing Countries and Beyond

Poverty Measurement Training:  Monitoring Poverty and Inequality in Developing Countries and Beyond

Presenters: Dean Jolliffe, Hai-Anh Dang, Nishant Yonzan, Diana C. Garcia Rojas
(World Bank Group); David Johnson (IARIW)

Course Description:  This training will detail how to monitor several measures of wellbeing, including poverty, prosperity, inequality, and social mobility. It will go through the key steps of monetary poverty analysis, including household survey data collection, creation of consumption aggregates, adjustments for price variation and household composition, construction of poverty lines, and calculation of different poverty measures. Finally, the course will demonstrate how to access harmonized consumption data from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) through Stata, R, and a remote-execution system, and include hands-on exercises with the data. The course was developed with financial support from the UK government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Programme. 

• Learning Objectives: The course is designed to improve the ability to think critically about reported measures of poverty, prosperity, inequality and social mobility – both to assess the ways in which they can be used to better inform policy and also to understand their shortcomings. In addition to this broad objective, a very specific objective of the course will be to teach how to use online tools to access data on these concepts and develop in some cases, global, regional and country estimates.
• Target Audience and Qualifications: Researchers, analysts, and advisors to policy makers interested in measuring and estimating poverty, prosperity, inequality & mobility. Participants are expected to have prior training in economics and statistics, as well as a working knowledge of the statistical software Stata. For the applied sessions, participants are advised to bring a laptop equipped with Stata version 16 or later, or with R installed.