Advanced Search

Poverty, inequality, and geographic targeting: Evidence from Small-Area Estimates in Mozambique

Contents:

Author Info

  • Simler, Kenneth R.
  • Nhate, Virgulino

Abstract

"Typical living standards surveys can provide a wealth of information about welfare levels, poverty, and other household and individual characteristics. However, these estimates are necessarily at a high level of aggregation, because such surveys usually include only a few thousand households, with coarse spatial stratification. Larger databases, such as national censuses, provide sufficient observations for more disaggregated analysis, but typically collect very little socioeconomic information. This paper combines data from the 1996–97 Mozambique National Household Survey of Living Conditions with the 1997 National Population and Housing Census to generate small-area (subdistrict) estimates of welfare, poverty, and inequality, with the associated standard errors. These small-area estimates are then used to explore several dimensions of poverty and inequality in Mozambique, particularly with regard to geographical targeting of antipoverty efforts. Reliably identifying and targeting the poor can be administratively costly, especially in rural Africa, where low population density and weak administrative capacity are common. Geographical targeting, or targeting poor areas, is sometimes proposed as a feasible alternative to targeting poor people, and poverty maps may serve as a valuable tool in this regard. Unfortunately, the notion of poor areas might not always be especially useful, as appears to be the case in Mozambique. The poverty maps do not reveal a particularly strong spatial concentration of poverty; the differences in poverty levels between areas tend to be subtle. This pattern is also observed in the decomposition of small-area inequality estimates, which shows that only about 20 percent of consumption inequality is accounted for by inequality between districts or between administrative posts. The picture that emerges of the poor living alongside the nonpoor indicates that targeting poor areas is likely to result in leakage to the nonpoor in that area, and considerable under-coverage of the significant numbers of poor households in areas that are less poor.”" Authors' Abstract

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/fcndp192.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in its series FCND discussion papers with number 192.

Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML (with abstract), plain text (with abstract), BibTeX, RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite), ReDIF
Length:
Date of creation: 2005
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:fpr:fcnddp:192

Contact details of provider:
Postal: 2033 K Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 202-862-5600
Fax: 202-467-4439
Email:
Web page: http://www.ifpri.org/
More information through EDIRC

For corrections or technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().

Related research

Keywords: Inequality ; Geographic targeting ; Small area estimation ; Poverty mapping ;

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Jayne, Thomas S. & Yamano, Takashi & Weber, Michael T. & Tschirley, David L. & Benfica, Rui M.S. & Neven, David & Chapoto, Antony & Zulu, Ballard, 2002. "Smallholder Income And Land Distribution In Africa: Implications For Poverty Reduction Strategies," 2002 Annual meeting, July 28-31, Long Beach, CA 19692, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
  2. Handa, Sudhanshu & Simler, Kenneth, 2000. "Quality or quantity?," FCND discussion papers 83, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
  3. Harold Alderman & Miriam Babita & Gabriel Demombynes & Nthabiseng Makhatha & Berk Özler, 2002. "How Low Can You Go? Combining Census and Survey Data for Mapping Poverty in South Africa," Journal of African Economies, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(2), pages 169-200, June.
  4. Chris Elbers & Jean O. Lanjouw & Peter Lanjouw, 2003. "Micro--Level Estimation of Poverty and Inequality," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 71(1), pages 355-364, January.
  5. Hentschel, Jesko, et al, 2000. "Combining Census and Survey Data to Trace the Spatial Dimensions of Poverty: A Case Study of Ecuador," World Bank Economic Review, Oxford University Press, vol. 14(1), pages 147-65, January.
  6. Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 1983. "On an Extension of the Gini Inequality Index," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 24(3), pages 617-28, October.
  7. Ravallion, Martin & Wodon, Quentin, 1997. "Poor areas, or only poor people?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 1798, The World Bank.
  8. Datt, Gaurav & Simler, Kenneth & Mukherjee, Sanjukta & Dava, Gabriel, 2000. "Determinants of poverty in Mozambique (1996-97)," FCND discussion papers 78, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
  9. Handa, Sudhanshu, 2002. "Raising primary school enrolment in developing countries: The relative importance of supply and demand," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 103-128, October.
  10. Tarp, Finn & Simler, Kenneth & Matusse, Cristina & Heltberg, Rasmus & Dava, Gabriel, 2002. "The robustness of poverty profiles reconsidered," FCND discussion papers 124, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
  11. Fafchamps, Marcel & Quisumbing, Agnes R., 1999. "Social roles, human capital, and the intrahousehold division of labor," FCND discussion papers 73, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
  1. Walker, Thomas S. & Pitoro, Raul & Tomo, Alda & Sitoe, Isabel & Salencia, Celestino & Mahanzule, Rosalina & Donovan, Cynthia & Mazuze, Feliciano M., 2006. "Priority Setting for Public-Sector Agricultural Research in Mozambique with the National Agricultural Survey Data," Food Security Collaborative Working Papers 56113, Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics.
  2. Claudio A. Agostini & Philip Brown, 2007. "Local Distributional Effects of Government Cash Transfers in Chile," William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series wp872, William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fpr:fcnddp:192

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.