From the 7-8th November 2019, the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW) in partnership with the World Bank held a conference on “New Approaches to Defining and Measuring Poverty in a Growing World”. A diverse audience consisting of international researchers from academia, the World Bank, and national statistics and census bureaus attended the conference. The keynote “Left Behind?” was delivered by Professor Martin Ravallion (Georgetown University, United States) who brought to attention the rise of global inequality and addressed issues such as intra-household inequality.
Mark Brooks presented his paper 'Comprehensive Data Quality Studies as a Component of Poverty Assessments' drawing upon data collected under the TVSEP project. In his paper he examined the determinants of non-sampling errors (NSE) in income items. By accounting for extensive para data and applying a comprehensive approach, the paper provided lessons for large surveys conducting interviews with Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing. The paper also emphasized innovations to improve the timeliness and reliability of poverty data and pointed out the need for a better understanding of NSE and the underlying psychology of responses.
At the conference novel approaches of measuring poverty such as “nowcasting”, spatial analyses using satellite data and machine learning were discussed. Furthermore, the use of complementary data sets from national accounts or the implementation of repeat cross-sectional surveys were suggested to alleviate the scarcity of poverty data.
