Regional Poverty Analysis and Monitoring Workshop

Tara Vishwanath(World Bank)

Islamabad, Pakistan

March 18-23, 2002

Poverty Reduction ApproachesConceptual Underpinnings

• Eighties saw an almost exclusive focus on growth – income based poverty

• The nineties complemented growth with capabilities- health, education, nutrition

• This is now further expanded to include vulnerability, voice, and power.

Dimensions of Poverty

• Lack of Opportunity

• Low Capabilities

• Low levels of security

• Empowerment

• These are highly interrelated and complementary

Dimensions – contd.

• Each dimension represents an evolution of development thinking

- Criticality of markets

- Criticality of institutions- private, public, political

• Resources need to be complemented with the “right” incentives for effectiveness.

Substantive Challenges Creating Opportunity

• Design interventions to account for institutional realities and distributional and welfare impacts of policy

• Increase support to “pro-poor” growth approaches- as in promote market activities for the poorer groups

• Focus on building assets of the poor:– Redistribution– Service delivery issues

Substantive ChallengesImproving Security

• Reduce vulnerability: from the macro to household level to lessen impact of shocks

• Increase capacity at the household and aggregate levels to mitigate and cope with risk

• Pay heed to existence of informal mechanisms in the design of interventions

Substantive ChallengesEnabling Empowerment

• Enhance capability of people to “influence” their own lives

• Strengthen participation of poor in decision making; make institutions more responsive to needs of the poor

• Improve governance and accountability of state institutions

• Reduce exclusionary social and institutional barriers.

The PRSP Framework

• PRSP initiative embodies the themes of the conceptual framework– Opportunity

– Security

– Empowerment

• Lending Instruments capture these ideas– Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSC)

– Investment lending for capacity building, learning, innovation

Implementation Challenges

• Enhance knowledge base on poverty and interrelated characteristics

• Link public actions to these observations and analyses

• Improve incentives for better performance

Enhancing the Knowledge Base on Poverty

• The conceptual framework poses enormous demands on data at various levels:– The country level aggregates– The community level – The household level– The Individual level– Time series/panel– Administrative data

• The list continues ……

How Much Poverty? Trends?

• Extent of Poverty: Its breath, depth, severity– Consumption/income aggregates at household level..

(HIES type data) – Regular intervals.. For consistent trends (every three to

five years) – Consistent methods for tracking consumption- for

comparability– Indicators of extent, depth, severity– Panels useful for vulnerability and income mobility

exercise

Who are the poor?

• Characteristics of Poverty– Extended multi-topic household surveys

measuring social indicators, living conditions, wages, sources of income….

– Disaggregated information for discerning patterns across gender, rural/urban, ethnicity, etc

– Facility and community surveys to identify key constraints to access markets and services

Why are they poor?

• Beyond constraints of income and access- to understand processes and behavior that impede poverty reduction– Qualitative and institutional data– User surveys– Participatory surveys to understand household

priorities and perceptions – Political economy issues.. Scope for collective

action

Data Needs and Sources: Summary

: GDP, consumption, investment, exports, imports, etc

System of National Accounts, trade statistics National

Central Statistical Agency

Public Finance Data: revenues, expenditures by category

Budgets and actuals Ministry of Finance, central and sectoral ministries

Consumer and producer prices Price, wage surveys Central Statistical Agency, central Bank

Climatic Data: temperature, rainfall, etc Direct Measurement National Weather Agency

Availability of services Community serveys, multi topic household surveys, qualitative studies

Local administration, sectoral ministries

Use of services Tracking surveys Local service providers

Individual and Household: consumption and income, living conditions, social indicators

Household budget/expenditure/income surveys, multi topic household surveys

Central statistical agency, ministry of labor/employment

Household Priorities: perceptions of poverty, usder satisfaction

Qualitative studies/user surveys Central statistical agency, sectoral ministries, others

Political economy issues Qualitative studies, electoral data Local authorities, etc

Analysis

• Define indicators and benchmarks for key dimensions of poverty

• Improve Poverty Monitoring systems and capacity

• Enhance diagnostic techniques to reflect multidimensional concept of poverty

-appropriate indicators, tools-qualitative and quantitative

Examples of Indicators

Goal Indicators

(Intermediate)

Indicator- Final(Outcomes and Impact)

•Reduce extreme poverty and expand economic opportunities for the poor

•Expenditure on employment programs for the poor•No. of beneficiaries of the employment program

•Incidence of extreme poverty: percentage falling below the poverty line•Poverty Gap ratio

•Enhance capabilities of poor men and women

•Expenditures on primary education as share of total on education•Exp. On primary health care•New schools built•No of primary school teachers•Net enrollment in primary•Percentage of poor with access to health care facilities•Number of doctors per 100,ooo inhabitants

•Literacy rates•Learning Achievement•Drop out and repetition rates•Infant, child and under five mortality rate•Malnutrition rate•Life expectancy

•Reduce Vulnerability of the poor •Expenditure on safety net programs•Number of poor receiving transfers from govt

•Number of persons protected from shocks (drought) as percentage of total affected•Prevalence of insurance (formal and informal)

Linking Public Action to Poverty Outcomes

• Use information from analysis- for strategy formulation- priority setting- design of key interventions

• Develop tools for assessing social and poverty impact of public action

• Strengthen focus and capacity for monitoring• Sustain the link between analysis, feedback and

action

Role of International Community

• Work off the PRS of countries- country ownership is key

• Facilitate implementation challenges:– Capacity building– Knowledge exchange and creation– Sustaining efforts – recognition of the fact that

such efforts take time