13.07.2015 Views

A Simple Poverty Scorecard for the Philippines

A Simple Poverty Scorecard for the Philippines

A Simple Poverty Scorecard for the Philippines

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comparable across organizations nor across countries, <strong>the</strong>y may be costly, and <strong>the</strong>iraccuracy and precision are unknown.If an organization wants to know what share of its participants are below apoverty line (say, USD1.25/day at 2005 purchase-power parity <strong>for</strong> <strong>the</strong> MillenniumDevelopment Goals, or <strong>the</strong> poorest half of people below <strong>the</strong> national poverty line asrequired of USAID microenterprise partners), or if it wants to measure movementacross a poverty line (<strong>for</strong> example, to report to <strong>the</strong> Microcredit Summit Campaign),<strong>the</strong>n it needs an income-based, objective tool with known accuracy. While incomesurveys are costly even <strong>for</strong> governments, many small, local organizations can implementan inexpensive scorecard that can serve <strong>for</strong> monitoring, management, and targeting.The statistical approach here aims to be understood by non-specialists. After all,if managers are to adopt poverty scoring on <strong>the</strong>ir own and apply it to in<strong>for</strong>m <strong>the</strong>irdecisions, <strong>the</strong>y must first trust that it works. Transparency and simplicity build trust.Getting “buy-in” matters; proxy means tests and regressions on <strong>the</strong> “determinants ofpoverty” have been around <strong>for</strong> three decades, but <strong>the</strong>y are rarely used to in<strong>for</strong>mdecisions, not because <strong>the</strong>y do not work, but because <strong>the</strong>y are presented (when <strong>the</strong>y arepresented at all) as tables of regression coefficients incomprehensible to lay people (withcryptic indicator names such as “HHSIZE_2”, negative values, many decimal places, andstandard errors). Thanks to <strong>the</strong> predictive-modeling phenomenon known as <strong>the</strong> “flatmax”, simple scorecards are about accurate as complex ones.2

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