Estimating Quarterly Poverty Rates Using Labor Force Surveys: A Primer

This paper builds on the existing cross-survey imputation literature to provide up-to-date estimates of poverty when official estimates are deemed outdated. This is achieved by imputing household expenditure data into Labor Force Surveys (LFSs) with models that have been estimated using Household Expenditure Surveys (HESs). In an application to Morocco, where the latest official poverty rate is for 2007, estimates of poverty are obtained for all years (and quarters) between 2001 and 2009. It is found that the approach accurately reproduces the official poverty statistics for the two years these surveys are available. The imputation-based estimates furthermore reveal that poverty has consistently declined over the entire 2001–2009 period. This would suggest that poverty reduction in Morocco was not halted by the global financial crisis. While our focus is on head-count poverty, the method can be applied to any welfare indicator that is a function of household income or expenditure, such as the poverty gap or the Gini index of inequality.