But … What is the Poverty Rate Today? : Testing Poverty Nowcasting Methods in Latin America and the Caribbean

Caruso, German ; Lucchetti, Leonardo ; Malasquez, Eduardo ; Scot, Thiago ; Castaneda, R. Andres

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: POVERTY;    POVERTY MEASUREMENT;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8104
RP-ID  :  WPS8104

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Poverty estimates usually lag behind twoyears, which makes it difficult to provide real-time povertyanalysis to assess the impact of economic crisis and shocksamong the less well-off, and subsequently limits policyresponses. This paper takes advantage of up-to-date averageeconomic welfare indicators like the gross domestic productper capita and comprehensive harmonized micro data of morethan 180 household surveys in 15 Latin American countries.The paper tests three commonly used poverty nowcastingmethods and ranks their performance by comparingcountry-specific and regional poverty nowcasts with actualpoverty estimates for 2003–14 period. The validation resultsshow that the two bottom-up approaches, which simulate theperformance of each agent in the economy to nowcast overallpoverty, perform relatively better than the top-downapproach, which uses welfare estimates to explain theperformance of poverty at an aggregate level over time. Theresults are robust to additional sensitivity and robustness tests.