Counting the World's Poor : Problems and Possible Solutions

By Angus Deaton. 2001

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As recent discussions have made clear, the apparent lack of poverty reduction in the face of historically high rates of economic growth-both in the world as a whole and in specific countries (most notably India)-provides fuel for the argument that economic growth does little to reduce poverty. How confident can we be that the data actually support these inferences? At the international level, the regular revision of purchasing power parity exchange rates plays havoc with the poverty estimates, changing them in ways that have little or nothing to do with the actual experience of the poor. At the domestic level, the problems in measuring poverty are important not only for the world count but also for tracking income poverty within individual countries. Yet, in many countries, there are large and growing discrepancies between the survey data-the source of poverty counts-and the national accounts-the source of the measure of economic growth. Thus economic growth, as measured, has at best a weak relationship with poverty, as measured.

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Citations in the corpus

Globalization and Poverty: An Introduction (2005, methodology): “14 In the course of writing this introduction and directing the NBER study, I was surprised to learn that there has been almost no research which tests for any association between measures of globalization and measures of poverty based on household survey data (for the problems associated with using”
Handbook of cultural developmental science (2010, unknown): “Deaton, A. (2001).”
Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession (2013, unknown): “As Deaton (2005) shows, if the probability of compliance at the top decreases following a Pareto distribution and the true distribution of incomes is lognormal, the “true” variance will not be different from the one obtained from a truncated distribution.”
Changing Patterns Of South African Income Distribution: Towards Time Series Estimates Of Distribution And Poverty (2005, methodology): “This methodology has, however, been criticised by Ravallion (2001; 2002) and by Deaton (2003; 2001).”
How Not to Count the Poor (2005, background): “The second proposal, presented by Angus Deaton (2000, 2003) recommends the following five step formula: “1. start from the $ PPP 1993 poverty lines in Chen and Ravallion 2001; 2. ask UNDP and World Bank country offices to check these lines; 3. modify the lines to correct serious errors revealed at…”
Financial Development and Poverty Reduction: Can There be a Benefit without a Cost? (2008, methodology): “These data might be subject to measurement errors as underlined by Deaton (2001); the use of the System GMM estimator may help reduce this bias.”
Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, background): “Here incomes are expressed in ‘‘purchasing power parity’’ dollars (PPP$), 6 in order to measure, Source: Arrighi, Silver, and Brewer (2003). a Based on World Bank data.”
World Agriculture: Towards 2015/2030: An Fao Perspective (2002, background): “of the shortcomings behind the international poverty lines the interested reader is referred to Deaton (2001) and”
Channels and Policy Debate in the Globalization-Inequality-Poverty Nexus (2006, background): “This kind of position with a particular ideological stance might be questioned in the context of the fiercely 2 See Wade (2002) and Deaton (2001, 2002) for critical discussions of the World Bank’s estimates of global poverty and inequality used in these studies.”