Geographic aspects of inequality and poverty

Poverty analysis is often based on national level indicators that are compared over time or across countries. The broad trends that can be identified using aggregate information are useful for evaluating and monitoring the overall performance of a country. For many policy and research applications, however, the information that can be extracted from aggregate indicators is not sufficient. Researchers and policy makers therefore increasingly collect or construct geographically disaggregated indicators that provide information about the spatial distribution of inequality and poverty within a country. Such data sets are sometimes called “poverty maps” since they allow the visualization of the incidence and magnitude of poverty across space. These pages discuss briefly why geographic aspects of inequality and poverty have become an important component of poverty research and policy analysis, how poverty maps are constructed, what their limitations are, and how they can be used in research and policy making.