Pakistan Poverty Map 2019–2020

Overview & Synopsis

This paper summarizes the approach used to estimate monetary poverty for Pakistan in 2019–20 at the district level. The small area estimation method is used to impute welfare from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2018–19 into the Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement Survey 2019–20. This application differs from the standard small area estimation implementations that use a survey-to-census method because the two surveys are household surveys. Using surveys instead of a census as the target data offers additional information for modeling poverty, but it also comes at the expense of noise due to sampling. Monetary poverty rates are estimated for 126 districts in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan, including, for the first time, the districts of the former Federal Administered Tribal Areas and the former Frontier Regions. Using the Census Empirical Best method, the analysis obtains poverty estimates with higher precision and accuracy than those of the methodology previously implemented in Pakistan.