Creating a poverty map for Azerbaijan

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Description/Abstract

'Poverty maps' - graphic representations of spatially disaggregated estimates of welfare - are increasingly used to geographically target scare resources. But their development in many low resource settings is hampered due to data constraints. Data on income or consumption are often unavailable or direct survey estimates for small areas yield unacceptably large standard errors. Census data offer the required level of coverage but do not generally contain appropriate information. Alternative methods aim either at combining survey data with unit record data from the Census to produce estimates of income or expenditure for small areas or at developing alternative welfare rankings, such as asset indices, using existing census data. This paper develops a set of poverty maps for Azerbaijan. Two alternative approaches are adopted. First, a map is constructed using an asset index based on data from the 1999 Census to produce reliable estimates of welfare at the raion level. Second, an alternative map is derived using imputed household consumption, combining information from the 2002 Household Budget Survey (HBS) with 1999 Census data. This provides a unique opportunity to compare the welfare rankings obtained at the regional level under the two approaches.