A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality
Rows 2 and 3 report the population distribution in urban and rural areas for 2003 using the national quintiles. Consider the value 18.1 [2,A] in the urban row. This value implies that 18.1 percent of the total urban population falls in the first quintile. The next cell is 19.6 [2,B], meaning that 19.6 percent of the total urban population falls in the second quintile. Similarly, 21.1 percent [2,E] of the total urban population falls in the fifth quintile. The picture is slightly different for the rural area, where 19.0 percent [3,E] of the total rural population falls in the fifth quintile and 21.8 percent [3,A] falls in the lowest quintile. In 2006, the urban population share in the first two quintiles increased to 19.0 percent [4,A] and 21.6 percent [4,B], respectively, but the rural population share in the same two quintiles decreased to 21.0 percent [5,A] and 18.5 percent [5,B], respectively. In contrast, the rural population share in the two highest quintiles increased, [3,D] and [3,E] compared with [5,D] and [5,E], but the urban population share in the two highest quintiles decreased, [2,D] and [2,E] compared with [4,D] and [4,E]. Lessons for Policy Makers This table is helpful in understanding the population’s mobility across different consumption expenditure levels in different regions. A single welfare measure—inequality or poverty—cannot reflect this mobility.
Analysis at the Subnational Level Analyses in the previous section concentrate at the national level and across rural and urban areas. For better policy implementation, we need to understand the results at a more disaggregated level, such as across subnational or geographic regions, or across population groups having different characteristics. In this section, we conduct subnational analysis, and in the next section, we conduct analysis across other population subgroups. Some tables here are similar to tables discussed in the previous section, and we occasionally refer to those tables. During the analysis across population subgroups, we assume the poverty line to be the same across all subgroups. However, in the ADePT program different poverty lines can be used for different subgroups in the analyses.
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