Nobuo Yoshida

Measurement of Accessibility and Its Applications

Access to markets and social services is a major determinant of economic status and welfare. Measurement of access is therefore of great importance for policy analysis and planning of interventions. The objective of this article is to expose readers to a new way of measuring and visualising accessibility—a potential accessibility index—and its applications. This index gauges connectivity of a specific location to large cities while taking into account the population of the cities or other destinations of interest and the transportation facilities to reach them. The potential accessibility index is used in the empirical literature to test the hypotheses from the ‘New Economic Geography’ regarding the impact of market access on regional economic growth. Along with recent developments in poverty mapping, this index has also been used to investigate the spatial relationship between poverty and market access. Accessibility indexes are gradually gaining acknowledgement of policy makers and development practitioners as important monitoring instruments of development. For example, a rural access indicator is part of the results measurement system for the World Banks International Development Association (IDA) programmes.

Is Extreme Poverty Going to End? An Analytical Framework to Evaluate Progress in Ending Extreme Poverty

The World Bank has recently adopted a target of reducing the proportion of population living below US

A Global Count of the Extreme Poor in 2012

1.25 a day at 2005 international prices to 3 percent by 2030. This paper reviews different projection methods and estimates the global poverty rate of 2030 modifying Ravallion (2013)s approach in that it introduces country-specific economic and population growth rates and takes into account the effect of changes in within-country inequality. This paper then identifies key obstacles to meeting the target and proposes a simple intermediate growth target under which the global poverty rate can be reduced to 3 percent by 2030. The findings of the analysis lend support to Basu (2013)s argument that accelerating growth is not enough and sharing prosperity within and across countries is essential to end extreme poverty in one generation.

Hybrid survey to improve the reliability of poverty statistics in a cost-effective manner

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Banks twin goals, the new poverty line was chosen so as to preserve the definition and real purchasing power of the earlier

Design of a multi-stage stratified sample for poverty and welfare monitoring with multiple objectives : a Bangladesh case study

1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs) in poor countries. Using the new 2011 PPPs, the new line equals

Prospects of estimating poverty with phone surveys : experimental results from Serbia

1.90 per person per day. The higher value of the line in US dollars reflects the fact that the new PPPs yield a relatively lower purchasing power of that currency vis-à-vis those of most poor countries. Because the line was designed to preserve real purchasing power in poor countries, the revisions lead to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence: from 14.5 percent in the old method to 14.1 percent in the new method for 2011.In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 percent of the worlds population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents the detailed methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats, limitations, perils and pitfalls of the approach taken.

Costing household surveys for monitoring progress toward ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity

This paper studies the benefits, in terms of reliability and frequency of poverty statistics, of conducting a hybrid survey that collects non-consumption data from all surveyed households and consumption data from only a small subsample. Collecting detailed consumption or income data for the purpose of estimating poverty is costly and many low-income countries cannot afford to carry out such surveys on a regular basis. One option is to collect only non-consumption data and use consumption models developed from a previous round of household survey data to project poverty data. Although this approach is cost-effective because collection of non-consumption data is much cheaper than collection of consumption data, it is vulnerable to a structural change between the current and previous household surveys and might produce poverty estimates that are not comparable with the previous ones. Instead, the hybrid approach creates consumption models from a subsample of the current survey and applies them to the entire survey to project consumption data for all households in the sample. This paper examines the hybrid approach with data from the Bangladesh Household Income Expenditure Surveys of 2000 and 2005. Improvements in accuracy are achieved even with subsamples of just 320 or 640 households. Budget simulations confirm that the additional cost of collecting consumption data for such small subsamples is minimal.

Robustness of Shared Prosperity Estimates: How Different Methodological Choices Matter

This paper describes the design of a multi-stage stratified sample for the Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2016/17. This survey instrument will be used by the Government of Bangladesh to estimate reliable poverty and welfare statistics at three different levels: (i) annual estimates at the district level, (ii) quarterly estimates at the national level, and (iii) annual estimates at the division level for urban and rural areas. The sample for this survey was designed to achieve these three objectives. The paper explains how the three objectives are prioritized and how inconsistencies in achieving more than one objective can be reconciled. Further, the paper modifies the standard formulas to estimate the optimal sample size and the allocation of the sample across strata by explicitly taking into consideration the effect of clustering in the sample.

A global count of the extreme poor in 2012 : data issues, methodology and initial results

Telephone surveys enable us to collect data in a cost-effective and timely manner, but may not be conducive for collecting detailed consumption or income data for measuring poverty due to the required length of the interview and complexity of the questions. Combining telephone surveys with a survey-to-survey imputation technique may be a solution, as this technique can produce reliable poverty estimates from only 10 to 20 simple questions. However, this approach may lead to biased results if the interview mode, that is, face-to-face versus telephone interviews, affects how households respond to questions. By conducting the first survey experiment to examine potential differences in poverty estimates between interview modes, this study finds that the reporting patterns changed very little between the two interview modes, and the bias in poverty estimates due to interview mode is statistically insignificant. These findings suggest that poverty monitoring via telephone surveys is promising, but additional experiments in other country contexts are encouraged.

Poverty in Sri Lanka: the impact of growth with rising inequality

On October 15, 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim announced the World Bank Group’s commitment to support the 78 poorest countries to implement a multi-topic household survey every three years between 2016 and 2030, for monitoring progress toward ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. This paper estimates the resource requirements to achieve the objectives of implementing 390 surveys across 78 International Development Association countries from 2016 to 2030, and providing direct technical assistance to the national statistical offices on all facets of survey design, implementation, and dissemination toward timely production of quality household survey data. The approach to the costing exercise is unique, as it makes use of detailed data on actual survey implementation and technical assistance costs from a group of countries, unlike previous attempts at costing household survey data gaps. The required total budget, in accordance with the survey design features recommended by the World Bank Household Survey Strategy, is estimated at US