Institution: World Bank
E-mail: Bozler@worldbank.org
Biosummary:
Education: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Ph.D. in Economics, doctoral candidate (expected June 2000). Fields of Concentration: Development Economics, Economics of Education. B.Sc. in Mathematics. Bosphorus University, Istanbul, Turkey. June 1991.
Work experience: 01/1996 - current: The World Bank, Washington, DC. Long-term Consultant, Development Economics Research Group, Poverty and Human Resources Team.
Past and current work include:
- The India Poverty Project (May 1993-January 1996, working with Martin Ravallion)
- Impact Evaluation of Decentralization and Privatization in Education Projects
- Economic Analysis of the Lebanon General Education Project
- Combining Census and Survey Data to Study Spatial Dimensions of Poverty and Inequality
- Impact Evaluation of the Nicaraguan Emergency Social Investment Funds
- Capacity building in client countries (Nicaragua, South Africa)
Title: Is census income an adequate measure of household welfare? Combining census and survey data to construct a poverty map of South Africa. Co-authors: Harold Alderman, Miriam Babita, Jean Lanjouw, Peter Lanjouw, Nthabiseng Makhatha, Amina Mohamed, Olivia Qaba.
Theme: 1A
Poverty maps, spatial descriptions of the distribution of poverty in any given country, are most useful to policy-makers and researchers when they are finely disaggregated, i.e. when they represent small geographic units, such as cities, towns, or villages. Unfortunately, almost all household surveys are too small to be representative at such levels of disaggregation, and most census data do not contain the required information to calculate poverty.
The 1996 South African census is an exception, in that it does contain income information for each individual in the household. In this paper, we show that the income from the census data provides only a weak proxy for the average income or poverty rates at either the provincial level or at lower levels of aggregation. We also demonstrate a simple method of imputing expenditures for every household in the census, using information in the October Household Survey (OHS) and the Income Expenditure Survey (IES) in 1995. The resulting predicted household consumption values are plausible and provide a good fit with the IES data. The poverty rates for each province, district council, and magisterial district based on this methodology are provided in the annex.