Brazil 2020 data update: Methodological adjustments to the World Bank’s poverty and inequality estimates

The Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNADC in Portuguese) is the main source of information for poverty monitoring in Brazil. The PNADC 2020 annual release was published in November 2021. The 2020 survey underwent methodological changes compared to earlier years. Most changes do not affect comparability with previous years. However, there is evidence of significant under-coverage of the “Auxilio Emergencial†(AE) program. While administrative records indicate over 68 million AE recipients, only about 20 million are observed in the survey. This paper describes an approach to impute AE beneficiary status as a way to complement the observed AE status as reported in the survey and to better capture the evolution of income and poverty in Brazil during COVID-19. Incorporating eligibility criteria from the AE (demographic, employment, and income), the method results in 42.2 million AE recipients in the survey – leading to a more reasonable undercoverage rate. Sensitivity analyses find similar results. The adjustments described in this paper are included in the World Bank’s poverty and inequality estimates for Brazil 2020 (published in April 2022). The poverty estimates in 2020 are 13.1 percent at the US$5.50 poverty line and 1.7 percent at the US$1.90 line. The Gini coefficient is estimated at 0.488.