We develop a procedure to estimate poverty counts in India from the 55th Round of the Na- tional Sample Survey (NSS), a large household survey run in 1999-2000. The evidence suggests that a change in the survey design caused the reports on household expenditure to change to an extent that it is impossible, without adjustments, to compare poverty estimates from this survey with those obtained from previous NSS Rounds. More generally, the paper addresses the problem of comparing the distribution of a variable across differently designed surveys, when the different design causes the respondents? reports about the variable to be incomparable across the surveys. The proposed procedure requires only the existence of a set of auxiliary variables whose reports are not affected by the different survey design, and whose relation with the main variable of interest is stable across the surveys. The estimator, instead, does not require spe- ciÞc functional form assumptions on the relation between the main variable of interest and the auxiliary variable. In the context of NSS data, we identify a set of variables whose reports are not systematically affected by the changes implemented in the survey design, and we provide evidence of the stability over time of the distribution of per capita total expenditure conditional on these variables. We describe an experiment to evaluate the performance of the estimator, showing that it provides satisfactory results, both in the estimation of poverty counts and in the estimation of the density of per capita expenditure. Finally, we use our estimator to calculate adjusted estimates for poverty in India using data from the 1999-2000 NSS Survey. The results show a sharp reduction in poverty in the nineties, even if in rural areas the reduction is not as large as that implied by the unadjusted Þgures.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. 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.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies. in its series Working Papers with number
186.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (David Long).
Related research
Keywords:
Cited by: (explanations, 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.)
Did you know? Citation analysis on IDEAS includes online papers that are freely accessible and whose text could be automatically analyzed, currently about 210000 papers.