57 such countries implemented a survey in 2011. Thus, the number of surveys in these countries need to increase drastically.

Finally, we propose to add a goal concerning improving the quality of poverty data. The World Bank’s recent Policy Research Report (Jolliffe _et al_ 2014) stressed the importance of improving the quality of data for monitoring the WBG’s twin goals. Maintaining comparability of data over time and adopting and executing a poverty measurement methodology that meets the global standard are key markers of data quality. Since 2010, the Bank’s Global Poverty Working Group (GPWG) has been gathering available poverty data across the world, and at the same time vetting the quality of the associated poverty statistics before sending them to the WDI. The number of poverty estimates that had to be dropped from the WDI – because the quality of the estimates was not good enough or the estimates were not comparable to those in the previous rounds – was quite high. Indeed, for WDI 2011 (the first WDI update after the GPWG was created) the GPWG could add 412 poverty estimates but also needed to drop 66 poverty estimates due to weak quality; about 86 percent of all estimates were deemed to be of good enough quality for the WDI database. Quality issues surrounding poverty estimates remain a concern, and given how important and expensive the collection of household survey data is, it is vital to ensure quality.

In this context, we propose another target for improving the quality of poverty estimates:

#  Target 3: _All new poverty estimates are of good quality and thus can be included in the WDI_ .

This target would imply that all, i.e., 100 percent, poverty estimates that are generated by countries should be of sufficiently high quality to be included in the WDI database. This again would be a challenging target, especially since target 1 calls for more surveys in countries which currently collect little or no poverty data, and with bold initiatives to expand survey coverage data quality could suffer unless special attention is paid.

# **6. Practical Considerations in Achieving the Data Availability Targets**

# **Target 1:** _All countries will have two or more poverty data points in the last ten years by 2030._

As of October 2014, 57 countries have a pronounced inadequacy or deprivation of poverty data as they have less than two data points in the ten years interval of 2002-11. Out of these 57 countries with less than two data points, 29 countries do not have any data in the last ten years and 28 countries have only one data point. For those countries with data deprivation, a medium to long term commitment to improve data availability has to be established. The issue with these 57 countries seems twofold, 1) data simply do not exist, or 2) data cannot be accessed by the WBG.

Most of the 29 countries<sup>15</sup> with extreme data deprivation are small island states in the Caribbean Sea or the Pacific Ocean. Since sampling errors do not change much with population size, the per capita cost of reaching similar levels of sampling errors tend to be higher for smaller countries compared with larger countries. As a result, the financial burden of regularly carrying out sample household surveys to collect consumption data is high for most small island states in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is likely

> 15 These countries are: St. Kitts and Nevis; Vanuatu; Tuvalu; Turkmenistan; Trinidad and Tobago; Tonga; Suriname; St. Vincent and the Grenadines; St. Lucia; Somalia; Samoa; Palau; Myanmar; Micronesia, Fed. Sts.; Marshall Islands; Libya; Korea, Rep.; Korea, Dem. Rep.; Kiribati; Haiti; Grenada; Guyana; Eritrea; Dominica; Cuba; Belize; Antigua and Barbuda; American Samoa; and Algeria.

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