The World Bank Economic Review Advance Access originally published online on April 6, 2006
The World Bank Economic Review 2006 20(1):91-113; doi:10.1093/wber/lhj005
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Robust Multidimensional Spatial Poverty Comparisons in Ghana, Madagascar, and Uganda
Jean-Yves Duclos is a professor of economics and director of the Inter-University Center on Risk, Economic Policies, and Employment (CIRPÉE) at Université Laval; his email address is jyves{at}ecn.ulaval.ca.
David Sahn is a professor of economics and director of the Food and Nutrition Policy Program at Cornell University; his email address is des16{at}cornell.edu.
Stephen D. Younger is an associate director of the Food and Nutrition Policy Program at Cornell University; his email address is sdy1{at}cornell.edu.
Spatial poverty comparisons are investigated in three African countries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that it seeks poverty orderings that are robust to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines and indices. In addition, the study seeks to ensure that the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures for multiple welfare variables. In contrast to earlier work, the methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as "union," "intersection," and "intermediate" approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well-being. Furthermore, unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature, this work computes the sampling distributions of the poverty estimators to perform statistical tests of the difference in poverty measures. The methods are applied to two measures of well-being, the log of household expenditures per capita and children’s height-for-age z scores, using data from the 1988 Ghana Living Standards Study survey, the 1993 National Household Survey in Madagascar, and the 1999 National Household Survey in Uganda. Bivariate poverty comparisons are at odds with univariate comparisons in several interesting ways. Most important, it cannot always be concluded that poverty is lower in urban areas in one region compared with that in rural areas in another, even though univariate comparisons based on household expenditures per capita almost always lead to that conclusion.