Describing Poverty: Poverty Profiles

A well-presented poverty profile can be immensely useful in assessing how economic change is likely to affect aggregate poverty, even though the profile typically just uses basic techniques such as tables and graphs. Some tables show the poverty rate for each group, for example, by level of education of household head, or by region of the country. It is good practice to show the confidence intervals of the poverty rates, which works especially well when the information is shown graphically. Alternatively, one may show what fraction of the poor have access to facilities (running water or electricity, for instance) or live in a given region, and compare this with the circumstances of the nonpoor. This chapter illustrates these concepts using a number of graphs and tables based on data from Cambodia and Indonesia. The World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Handbook (1992) has a long list of questions that a poverty profile should address. Provided the data are available, it is helpful to show how poverty has evolved over time. The change can often be linked to economic growth, and sometimes to specific government policies. Chapter