Estimating a Poverty Trend for Nigeria between 2009 and 2019
Issues of data availability and incomparability in the measurement of household consumption arise frequently when measuring poverty trends over time. Yet, understanding these trends is key to guide national and international policy makers in their...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Washington, DC: World Bank
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/631201647459995911/Estimating-a-Poverty-Trend-for-Nigeria-between-2009-and-2019 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37161 |
| Summary: | Issues of data availability and
incomparability in the measurement of household consumption
arise frequently when measuring poverty trends over time.
Yet, understanding these trends is key to guide national and
international policy makers in their poverty reduction
efforts. This paper aims to estimate a long-run poverty
trend for Nigeria, a country whose poverty trends are
crucial for regional and global estimates. In 2020, the
Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics released the first
official poverty estimates for Nigeria in almost a decade,
calculated using the 2018/19 Nigerian Living Standards
Survey. Yet the official poverty estimates from the 2018/19
Nigerian Living Standards Survey cannot technically be
compared with those from the 2009/10 Harmonized Nigerian
Living Standards Survey—the previous official household
consumption survey—given key differences in the way
household consumption was measured and concerns around data
quality in the 2009/10 survey. To address this challenge,
this paper uses two distinct methodologies to construct a
poverty trend for Nigeria in the decade before the COVID-19
crisis. First, it uses sector-level gross domestic product
growth rates combined with micro-data from the 2018/19
Nigerian Living Standards Survey to “backcast” poverty rates
back to 2009. Second, it uses survey-to-survey imputation
methods and data collected throughout the decade through the
General Household Survey panel. Despite their very different
foundations, these two approaches produce very similar
results, suggesting that there was a small reduction in
poverty at the beginning of the decade, followed by a period
of stagnation or even a slight uptick in poverty following
the 2016 economic recession. The paper estimates a poverty
rate of between 42.2 and 46.3 percent in 2009, translating
into a reduction in the poverty headcount rate of between 3
and 7 percentage points between 2009 and 2018/19. |
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