Overview

Poverty is “pronounced deprivation in well-being.” The conventional view links wellbeing primarily to command over commodities, so the poor are those who do not have enough income or consumption to put them above some adequate minimum threshold. This view sees poverty largely in monetary terms.

Poverty may also be tied to a specific type of consumption; for example, people could be house poor or food poor or health poor. These dimensions of poverty often can be measured directly, for instance, by measuring malnutrition or literacy. The broadest approach to well-being (and poverty) focuses on the capability of

the individual to function in society. Poor people often lack key capabilities; they may have inadequate income or education, or be in poor health, or feel powerless, or lack political freedoms.

There are four reasons to measure poverty and distribution of income:

• To keep poor people on the agenda
• To be able to identify poor people and so to be able to target appropriate

interventions

• To monitor and evaluate projects and policy interventions geared to poor people
• To evaluate the effectiveness of institutions whose goal is to help poor people.

Objectives of the course:

• Household data cleaning using Stata or R softwares
• Introduction to poverty and Distribution analysis
• Measuring Poverty using Household Surveys
• Measuring Income Inequality using household surveys
• Tax and expenditure incidence analysis
• Measuring multidimensional poverty
• Introduction to DASP