The Relevance of Poverty Measurement to Food Security Policy

While food security policies have been too frequently formulated, this article argues that the measurement of its incidence has not been on a regular basis. This study describes a number of concepts useful in poverty analysis and explains the great inertia or even positive resistance against new measurement. Nevertheless, the measures should conform to the presumed social bias in favor of the poor.food sector, poverty alleviation, poverty measurement, poverty incidence, food price stability

From Novelty to Normalcy: Polling in Myanmars Democratic Transition

Since the government of Myanmar* announced a transition from military rule to democracy in 2010, both domestic and international stakeholders have turned to polling to discover public opinion on a range of issues. This report examines the state of opinion research in Myanmar, identifies challenges, and makes recommendations for improvements.Although Myanmar has a decades-long history of market surveys, political polling is a relatively new phenomenon. Organizations operating in this field face four major challenges. The first is selecting a sample in a country that lacks reliable census or voter registration data, and lacks comprehensive access to telephones or the internet. The second is how to provide survey questionnaires in several languages to accommodate Myanmar's numerous ethnic groups. The third challenge relates to interviewers, both to their training and to accounting for possible response bias based on the interaction between the interviewer's sociodemographic background and the respondent's. Finally, polling groups and interviewers must ensure respondents' confidentiality.These problems are not unique to Myanmar. Pollsters around the world regularly grapple with similar dilemmas. What makes their task more challenging in Myanmar is the novelty of polling. Few people (even in civil society and political parties) understand its nature, and many are quick to dismiss the whole exercise when they do not like some of a poll's results. The report examines and refutes several of their criticisms

The data on Indian poverty and the poverty of ASEAN data

PRIFPRI

Subjective Poverty and Affluence in the Philippines

Surveys of self-rated poverty, done in the Philippines at the national level 56 times over 1983-2001, quarterly since 1992, demonstrate that poverty is volatile even in the short run. The self-rated poor are about twice as many as the poor officially defined. The official poverty line meets the subjective needs of only half of the self-rated poor. Surveys into food-poverty, hunger, and illness are internally consistent. New surveys on the subjective threshold of affluence find that, like the subjective threshold of poverty, it increases with schooling. For most people, the affluence threshold is only some three times their poverty threshold.poverty, poverty threshold, Philippines