IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/8683.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

International Comparisons of Poverty in South Asia

Author

Listed:
  • Islam,Tonmoy
  • Newhouse,David Locke
  • Yanez Pagans,Monica

Abstract

This paper explores the methodological differences underlying the construction of the national consumption aggregates that are used to estimate international poverty rates for all countries in the South Asia region, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The analysis draws on a regional dataset of standardized consumption aggregates to assess the sensitivity of international poverty rates to the items included in national consumption aggregates. A key feature of the standardized aggregate is that it includes the reported value of housing rent for urban Indian homeowners. Using the standardized consumption aggregates reduces the international poverty rate in South Asia by 1.3 percentage points, or about 18.5 million people. Comparing standardized and non-standardized monetary welfare indicators to other nonmonetary indicators suggests that the latter are more consistent with the standardized consumption aggregates. Overall, the results strongly suggest that harmonizing the construction of welfare measures, particularly the treatment of imputed rent, can meaningfully improve the accuracy of international poverty comparisons.

Suggested Citation

  • Islam,Tonmoy & Newhouse,David Locke & Yanez Pagans,Monica, 2018. "International Comparisons of Poverty in South Asia," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8683, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8683
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/805971545243107437/pdf/WPS8683.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nafees Ahmad Nafees & Javed Iqbal & Zahoor Ul Haq, 2022. "Assessing Modified Multidimensional Poverty Index and its Demographic Correlates in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa," Journal of Policy Research (JPR), Research Foundation for Humanity (RFH), vol. 8(3), pages 1-10, December.
    2. Manzoor Hussain Memon, 2023. "Poverty, Gap and Severity Estimates for Disaster Prone Rural Areas of Pakistan," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 166(3), pages 645-663, April.
    3. Muhammad Daoud Butt & Siew Chin Ong & Muhammad Umar Wahab & Muhammad Fawad Rasool & Fahad Saleem & Adnan Hashmi & Ahsan Sajjad & Furqan Aslam Chaudhry & Zaheer-Ud-Din Babar, 2022. "Cost of Illness Analysis of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: The Findings from a Lower-Middle Income Country," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(19), pages 1-15, October.
    4. Muhammad Luqman, Sheer Abbas, Mudassar Yasin, Muhammad Yaseen, Muhammad Umer Mehmood, Shahbaz Ahmad, 2022. "Rural Poverty and Its Dimensions: Evidences from North-West Region of Pakistan," Journal of Economic Impact, Science Impact Publishers, vol. 4(2), pages 39-50.
    5. Martin Rama, 2019. "Challenges in Measuring Poverty and Understanding its Dynamics: A South Asian Perspective," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 65(S1), pages 2-32, November.
    6. Muhammad Luqman & Saleem Ashraf & Babar Shahbaz & Tahir Munir Butt & Raheel Saqib, 2021. "Rural Development Through Non-State Actors in Highlands of Pakistan," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(2), pages 21582440211, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:8683. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.