Poor, or Just Feeling Poor? On Using Subjective Data in Measuring Poverty
By M. Ravallion. 2012
162 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The challenges faced in calibrating poverty and welfare measures to objective data have long been recognized. Until recently, most economists have resisted a seemingly obvious solution, namely to ask people themselves:"Do you feel poor?"The paper studies the case for and against this approach. It is argued that, while one would not want to use self-assessments as welfare metrics in their own right, there is scope for using such data to help calibrate multidimensional measures. Indeed, the idea of a"social subjective poverty line"(below which people tend to think they are poor, but above which they do not) is arguably the most conceptually appealing way of defining poverty. However, the paper points to a number of concerns that have received insufficient attention, including the choice of covariates, survey design issues, measurement errors, frame-of-reference effects, and latent heterogeneity in personality traits and personal tradeoffs. Directions for future research are identified.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d5d07e697f192fa5b1e691da4077bd0113e0510
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Citations in the corpus
- More Relatively-Poor People in a Less Absolutely-Poor World (2012, unknown): “The relationship between poverty reduction and economic growth is complex, as it is known that both depend on initial distribution (including poverty) and that there are important interaction effects between growth and distribution in how they impact on poverty (Ravallion, 2012d).”
- Measuring women’s decisionmaking: Indicator choice and survey design experiments from cash and food transfer evaluations in Ecuador, Uganda and Yemen (2015, background): “Even if one were to accept the premise that such issues defy objective assessment, quantitative tools can readily be applied to issues of subjectivity (see, for example, work on subjective poverty lines—Groedhart et al. 1977; Ravallion 2012).”