Robust Multidimensional Spatial Poverty Comparisons in Ghana, Madagascar, and Uganda
Spatial poverty comparisons are investigated in three African countries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that it seeks poverty orderings that are robust to t...
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Journal Article |
Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank
2014
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2006/01/17753340/robust-multidimensional-spatial-poverty-comparisons-ghana-madagascar-uganda http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16467 |
Summary: | Spatial poverty comparisons are
investigated in three African countries using
multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is
analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature
in that it seeks poverty orderings that are robust to the
choice of multidimensional poverty lines and indices. In
addition, the study seeks to ensure that the comparisons are
robust to aggregation procedures for multiple welfare
variables. In contrast to earlier work, the methodology
applies equally well to what can be defined as union,
intersection, and intermediate approaches to dealing with
multidimensional indicators of well-being. Furthermore,
unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature, this
work computes the sampling distributions of the poverty
estimators to perform statistical tests of the difference in
poverty measures. The methods are applied to two measures of
well-being, the log of household expenditures per capita and
children's height-forage z scores, using data from the
1988 Ghana Living Standards Study survey, the 1993 National
Household Survey in Madagascar, and the 1999 National
Household Survey in Uganda. Bivariate poverty comparisons
are at odds with univariate comparisons in several
interesting ways. Most important, it cannot always be
concluded that poverty is lower in urban areas in one region
compared with that in rural areas in another, even though
univariate comparisons based on household expenditures per
capita almost always lead to that conclusion. |
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