The paper shows that the improvement in targeting that can be achieved by this method offers significant reduction in leakages of benefits to the non-eligible households. Such maps can be used by policymakers to guide the allocation of transfers and to inform policy design. They can also provide the means to investigate the relationship between growth and distribution inside a country, thereby complementing research using a cross-country regression framework. A major impediment to the development of poverty maps has been that the income or consumption data necessary are typically available only from relatively small surveys. Census data have the required size, but not generally the required information.
Poverty maps based on census data, but constructed in an ad-hoc manner, can be quite unreliable.
We demonstrate how sample survey data can be combined with census data to yield predicted poverty rates for all households covered by the census. While this represents an improvement over ad-hoc poverty maps, we find that standard errors on the estimated poverty rates are not negligible. We have benefited from discussions with Uwe Deichmann, Stefan Dercon, Joanna Gomulka, Vassilis Hajivassiliou, Jeffrey Hammer, Berk Ozler and Martin Ravallion. Thanks also to Jim Shafer for helpful assistance. The views in this paper are our own and should not be taken to represent the views of the World Bank or any of its affiliates.