Abstract:
Obtaining comparable poverty estimates over time is critical for monitoring poverty trends and informing effective poverty reduction policies. Yet hardly any developing countries could construct consistent poverty trends over extended time periods due to changes to the consumption survey questionnaires and poverty lines that reflect changing consumption patterns and living standards. Furthermore, spatial and temporal deflators could be unavailable or could have been unsystematically employed, which could result in worsening incomparability of consumption aggregates. We propose a solution to these data challenges by applying data imputation to 13 survey rounds for Viet Nam during 1993-2022. Our results provide new, comparable, and smoother estimates of poverty trends for Viet Nam. We also offer a useful case study for other similar contexts.
