Poverty and Inequality Monitoring

One of three priority areas of the IPC is to strengthen efforts in developing countries to improve their capacity to benchmark and monitor poverty and inequality.

Objectives
Activities
Resources

Objectives

A good understanding of the extent and nature of poverty in a particular country constitutes a critical step in the development of policies and strategies seeking to reduce poverty and improve the living conditions of its most disadvantaged citizens. Without reliable and comparable data depicting the many facets of poverty in a country, it becomes difficult to formulate and implement policies and programmes to deal with the root causes. Experience has shown that effective strategies for combating poverty require a thorough diagnosis of a country's poverty situation, the establishment of targets and benchmarks for its reduction, and the regular monitoring of advances and impacts.

Yet these are areas in which many developing countries suffer acute capacity gaps. Too often, national statistical offices and key agencies lack the means (financial, technical and/or institutional) to gather and analyze timely, accurate, and policy-relevant data that would improve the profiling of poverty and living conditions in their countries. To address these shortcomings, IPC will develop a range of activities that seek to strengthen in-country capacities for the regular benchmarking and monitoring of poverty and inequality.

The centre believes that assisting developing countries in such a manner will be a critically important step for strengthening the design and policy making process required for producing effective poverty reducing strategies.

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Activities

There is great potential to transfer methodologies and practice among developing countries to give them the tools necessary to improve their capacities for monitoring levels of poverty and inequality.

Towards these ends, IPC will develop activities that seek to:

To carry out these activities, the centre will establish close linkages with experts and institutions similar to its strategic relationship with IPEA (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada). IPC will target partners whose experience in this area can be leveraged in order to facilitate knowledge sharing and cooperation among developing countries on poverty issues.

Under the direction of IPC, these efforts will include a special focus on establishing a methodology for estimating global poverty trends. As long as countries do not have accurate poverty estimates, efforts to understand who should be counted among a nation's poor - and what policy interventions best target them - will be compromised. The centre plans to further work on this issue by calling together an expert working group to consider various proposals for delineating viable national poverty lines in countries where they do not exist. IPC also plans to highlight heavily this topic in centre publications, both through its upcoming working paper series as well as its research bulletin, In Focus.

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Resources

The last 10 years have witnessed great advances in the collection and availability of high-quality survey data for monitoring poverty and well-being in developing countries. A number of research instruments have been standardized and applied across a variety of countries to track changes in income distribution, inequality, and poverty indices.

These include the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) and Global Poverty Monitoring database, both of which are administered by the World Bank. Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), overseen by UNICEF, also are commonly used to monitor the status of children in developing countries. The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are another survey tool as is the World Health Survey run by WHO. Independent research centres have started their own survey programs as well, including The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) at the Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg and UTIP at the University of Texas.

Click here for a list of additional links on this topic.

A broad range of publications has been produced that seek to analyze the results of such survey data. Others have discussed the various methodologies for benchmarking poverty and their usefulness. As a contribution to advancing knowledge on poverty measurement and monitoring methods, IPC will post and constantly update these released works made available for public access through its website.

Some recent studies on this topic include:

Click here for a list of additional works on this topic.

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