Nowcasting Global Poverty

This paper evaluates different methods for nowcasting country-level poverty rates, including methods that apply statistical learning to large-scale country-level data obtained from the World Development Indicators and Google Earth Engine. The methods are evaluated by withholding measured poverty rat...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mahler, Daniel Gerszon
Other Authors: Newhouse, David, Castaneda Aguilar, R. Andres
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C The World Bank 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: World Bank E-Library Archive - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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100 1 |a Mahler, Daniel Gerszon 
245 0 0 |a Nowcasting Global Poverty  |h Elektronische Ressource  |c Daniel Gerszon Mahler 
260 |a Washington, D.C  |b The World Bank  |c 2021 
300 |a 44 pages 
653 |a Poverty Lines 
653 |a Poverty Monitoring and Analysis 
653 |a Machine Learning 
653 |a Inequality 
653 |a Nowcasting 
653 |a Poverty Reduction 
653 |a Poverty Measurement 
653 |a Poverty 
700 1 |a Newhouse, David 
700 1 |a Castaneda Aguilar, R. Andres 
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082 0 |a 330 
520 |a This paper evaluates different methods for nowcasting country-level poverty rates, including methods that apply statistical learning to large-scale country-level data obtained from the World Development Indicators and Google Earth Engine. The methods are evaluated by withholding measured poverty rates and determining how accurately the methods predict the held-out data. A simple approach that scales the last observed welfare distribution by a fraction of real GDP per capita growth-a method that departs slightly from current World Bank practice-performs nearly as well as models using statistical learning on 1,000+ variables. This GDP-based approach outperforms all models that predict poverty rates directly, even when the last survey is up to five years old. The results indicate that in this context, the additional complexity introduced by applying statistical learning techniques to a large set of variables yields only marginal improvements in accuracy