# **1. Introduction**

Poverty is an indicator of paramount importance for gauging the socioeconomic well-being of a population. Especially during or after a shock, poverty estimates are invaluable for understanding the situation, as well as for assessing the severity of the impact and for identifying which parts of the population were most affected. Especially in the developing world, consumption-based monetary poverty measures are used, defining the poor as those households with consumption levels that fall below a set poverty line (Angus Deaton and Zaidi 2002). The poverty line is usually set at a consumption level adequate for sustaining the minimum level of welfare required for healthy living (Ravallion 1998). Consumptionbased poverty measures are widely used in development contexts and play a critical role in policy decisions (e.g. Beegle et al. 2016).

The measurement of consumption, however, has traditionally been very time consuming. A typical household consumption questionnaire contains a series of questions about the price and quantity consumed for each item, and whether it has been purchased, self-produced, or bartered. Usually encompassing more than 200 food and nonfood items, the time required to administer such a questionnaire can often substantially exceed two hours. In addition to high administration costs due to long interview times, measurement errors may become significant towards the end of the questionnaire as enumerators and respondents become fatigued. Respondents might also cancel the interview before it is completed, thus contributing to a higher non-response rate.

Enumerator and respondent fatigue are well documented in the literature (Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski 2000; Krosnick 1991) and become more pronounced for longer questionnaires (Rolstad, Adler, and Rydén 2011; Diehr et al. 2005; Snyder et al. 2007). Enumerator fatigue increases measurement errors often over the course of a day as well as over the time the survey progresses (Baird, Hamory, and Miguel 2008). Especially in consumption surveys, a long list of items can lead to enumerators cutting corners and fabricating data (Fiedler and Mwangi 2016; Finn and Ranchhod 2015) as well as prematurely ending interviews (A. Deaton and Grosh 2000). Respondents also become fatigued and, for example, learn to say no to consumption of items to evade more detailed follow-up questions (Kreuter et al. 2011; Eckman et al. 2014).

To overcome the challenges inherent to measuring consumption poverty, we propose a new methodology that combines an innovative questionnaire design with standard imputation techniques.<sup>2</sup> This new methodology allows us to substantially shorten the consumption questionnaire and reduce the interview time (less than 60 minutes for a standard questionnaire) by imputing deliberately absent consumption values for those items that are not explicitly asked about. Poverty estimates can be derived in this way without compromising the credibility of the resulting estimate. This new methodology is particularly useful in fragile states given the significant risks associated with lengthy interviews. It can also be useful to reduce enumerator and respondent fatigue, or to mitigate the problem of high non-response rates.

The most straightforward way to reduce the expected interview time is to skip rarely-consumed items. Another simple strategy is to ask the respondent about an aggregate amount of spending on an entire

> 2 A precursor methodology based on the same principle was previously published in Pape and Mistiaen 2015.

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