This book is an introduction to the theory and practice of poverty measurement. On completing this book you will be able to perform sophisticated analyses of income or consumption distribution for any standard household dataset using the ADePT program (a free download from the World Bank s website).

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Detailed analyses of poverty and wellbeing in developing countries, based on household surveys, have been ongoing for more than three decades. The large majority of developing countries now regularly conduct a variety of household surveys, and the information base in developing countries with respect to poverty and wellbeing has improved dramatically. Nevertheless, appropriate measurement of poverty remains complex and controversial. This is particularly true in developing countries where (i) the stakes with respect to poverty reduction are high; (ii) the determinants of living standards are often volatile; and (iii) related information bases, while much improved, are often characterized by significant non-sample error. It also remains, to a surprisingly high degree, an activity undertaken by technical assistance personnel and consultants based in developed countries. This book seeks to enhance the transparency, replicability, and comparability of existing practice. In so doing, it also aims to significantly lower the barriers to entry to the conduct of rigorous poverty measurement and increase the participation of analysts from developing countries in their own poverty assessments. The book focuses on two domains: the measurement of absolute consumption poverty and a first order dominance approach to multidimensional welfare analysis. In each domain, it provides a series of flexible computer codes designed to facilitate analysis by allowing the analyst to start from a flexible and known base. The book volume covers the theoretical grounding for the code streams provided, a chapter on 'estimation in practice', a series of 11 case studies where the code streams are operationalized, as well as a synthesis, an extension to inequality, and a look forward.

For anyone wanting to learn, in practical terms, how to measure, describe, monitor, evaluate, and analyze poverty, this Handbook is the place to start. It is designed to be accessible to people with a university-level background in science or the social sciences. It is an invaluable tool for policy analysts, researchers, college students, and government officials working on policy issues related to poverty and inequality.

Encompassing chapters that address both unidimensional and multidimensional poverty, this timely Research Handbook explores all aspects of poverty and deprivation measurement, not only detailing broad issues but also scrutinising specific domains and aspects of poverty, such as health, energy and housing. Its succinct and highly focussed chapters, written by a diverse range of authors, employ a combination of theoretical and empirical methodologies to offer well-rounded explorations of complex topics.

Gender equality is a core development objective in its own right and also smart development policy and business practice. No society can develop sustainably without giving men and women equal power to shape their own lives and contribute to their families, communities, and countries. And yet, critical gender gaps continue to exist in all countries and across multiple dimensions. The gender module of the World Bank’s ADePT software platform produces a comprehensive set of tables and graphs using household surveys to help diagnose and analyze the prevailing gender inequalities at the country level and over time. This book provides a step-by-step guide to the use of the ADePT software and an introduction to its basic economic concepts and econometric methods. The module is organized around the framework proposed by the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. It covers gender differences in outcomes in three primary dimensions of gender equality: human capital (or endowments), economic opportunities, and voice and agency. Particular focus is given to the analysis and decomposition techniques that allow for further exploring of gender gaps in economic opportunities.

In 2013, the World Bank Group adopted two new goals to guide its work: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. More specifically, the goals are to reduce extreme poverty in the world to less than 3 percent by 2030, and to foster income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each country. While poverty reduction has been a mainstay of the World Bank s mission for decades, the Bank has now set a specific goal and timetable, and for the first time, the Bank has explicitly included a goal linked to ensuring that growth is shared by all. The discussion until now has centered primarily on articulating the new goals. This report, the latest in World Bank s Policy Research Report series, goes beyond that and lays out their conceptual underpinnings, discusses their relative strengths and weaknesses by contrasting them with alternative indicators, and proposes empirical approaches and requirements to track progress towards the goals. The report makes clear that the challenges posed by the World Bank Group s new stance extend not just to the pursuit of these goals but, indeed, to their very definition and empirical content. The report also argues that an improved data infrastructure, consisting of many elements including the collection of more and better survey data, is critical to ensure that progress towards these goals can be measured, and policies to help achieve them can be identified and prioritized.

"This Policy Research Report was prepared by the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank by a team led by Dean Jolliffe and Peter Lanjouw"--Page xiii.

These lectures aim to help readers understand the logics and nature of the main indicators of inequality and poverty, with special attention to their social welfare underpinnings. The key approach consists in linking inequality and poverty measurement with welfare evaluation. As concern for inequality and poverty stems from ethical considerations, the measurement of those aspects necessarily involves some value judgments. Those value judgments can be linked, directly or indirectly, to welfare assessments on the distribution of personal and social opportunities. Inequality and poverty are thus considered to be partial aspects of the welfare evaluation of the opportunities in a given society. The volume includes two applications that illustrate how the models can be implemented. They refer to inequality of opportunity and poverty in education, using PISA data.

It was a part of the wisdom of mainstream economics that in the early stages of development inequality would rise but as growth persisted, it would, eventually, decline. Early evidence seemed to suggest that this pattern would be borne out. But, as time passed and growth persisted, inequality continued to grow, casting doubt on the received wisdom. The aim of this two-volume book is to analyze the current state of global and regional inequality, dissect the phenomenal increase in inequality that we have seen occur in recent times, and better understand the complex relationship between inequality and development. The political instability and conflict that we see around the world, arguably, has connection to economic deprivation of large segments of society and the perception of marginalization. This two-volume work acquires a special significance in the light of these developments.