Using demographic and health surveys to measure poverty - an application to South Africa

Type Journal Article - Studies in Economics and Econometrics
Title Using demographic and health surveys to measure poverty - an application to South Africa
Author(s)
Volume 26
Issue 3
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2002
Page numbers 53-70
URL http://journals.co.za/docserver/fulltext/bersee/26/3/bersee_v26_n3_a4.pdf?expires=1492512696&id=id&a​ccname=57709&checksum=A9071D5FD330CD8DD221F16FD6010D43
Abstract
There are different approaches to the measurement of poverty. These depend on the objective of the analysis, the nature of the data and the method employed in measuring poverty. The asset index approach applied to data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) has gained increasing popularity in recent years, particularly in analyses of the relationship between poverty, health and population issues. The results presented in this paper suggest that it is possible, in the absence of income and expenditure data, to employ the available data from the DHS to measure differences in the socioeconomic status of South African households. The asset index represents an internally coherent, robust and comparable indicator of poverty. An analysis of the relationship between poverty, health and population issues, for which the DHS data set presents a wealth of data, will be impossible without such an asset index.

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