Asher, Sam, Tobias Lunt, Ryu Matsuura, and Paul Novosad. "Development research at high geographic resolution: an analysis of night-lights, firms, and poverty in India using the shrug open data platform." The World Bank Economic Review 35, no. 4 (2021): 845-871.
@article{almn2021,
title={Development research at high geographic resolution: an analysis of night-lights, firms, and poverty in India using the shrug open data platform},
author={Asher, Sam and Lunt, Tobias and Matsuura, Ryu and Novosad, Paul},
journal={The World Bank Economic Review},
volume={35},
number={4},
year={2021},
publisher={Oxford University Press}
}
About
Consumption and poverty rate small-area estimates generated from the IHDS and the SECC. See notes for more details.
Consumption is not directly recorded by the SECC, so we generate small-area estimates following the methodology in Elbers et al. (2003). We use the complete SECC asset list for every household, and assign consumption values using data from the 2011-12 India Human Development Survey (IHDS-II). In the IHDS, we regress total household consumption on dummy variables that are equivalent to all asset and earning information contained in the SECC. We then use these regression coefficients to predict household-level consumption in the SECC microdata. This is used to generate consumption per capita at the individual level, which is in turn used to produce village level statistics for mean predicted consumption per capita, which is the variable found in the SHRUG. Rural and urban consumption are estimated separately. For more details see Asher and Novosad, 2020.
Consumption is reported as per capita annual consumption expenditure in 2012 INR.
Poverty estimates are calculated for two different specifications and pertain to the year 2012. The first poverty threshold is the $2 per person per day PPP (purchasing power parity) which was converted to a threshold of Rs.31 per person per day (based on exchange rate and PPP for the year 2012). The second threshold is based on the recommendations of the 2005 Tendulkar Committee Expert Group. Tendulkar Committee defined a povery line of Rs. 27 per capita per day for rural areas and Rs. 33 per capita per day for urban areas.