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International poverty estimates for countries in Africa commonly rely on national consumer price indexes to adjust trends in nominal consumption over time for changes in the cost of living. However, the consumer price index is subject to various types of measurement bias. This paper uses Engel curve estimations to assess bias in the consumer price index and its implications for estimated poverty trends. The results suggest that in 11 of 16 Sub-Saharan African countries in this study, poverty reduction may be understated because of consumer price index bias. With correction of consumer price index bias, poverty in these countries could fall between 0.8 and 5.7 percentage points per year faster than currently thought. For two countries, however, the paper finds the opposite trend. There is no statistically significant change in poverty patterns after adjusting for consumer price index bias for the other three countries.

Cpi Bias --- Engel Curve --- Inflation --- Poverty

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What is the welfare effect of a price change? This simple question is one of the most relevant and controversial questions in microeconomic theory and its different answers can lead to severe heterogeneity in empirical results. This paper returns to this question with the objective of providing a general framework for the use of theoretical contributions in empirical works, with a particular focus on poor people and poor countries. Welfare measures (such as Equivalent Variation or Consumer's Surplus) and computational methods (such as Taylor's approximations or the Vartia method) are compared to test how these choices result in different welfare measurement under different price shock scenarios. As a rule of thumb and irrespective of parameter choices, welfare measures converge to approximately the same result for price changes below 10 percent. Above this threshold, these measures start to diverge significantly. Budget shares play an important role in explaining such divergence, whereas the choice of demand system has a minor role. Under standard utility assumptions, the Laspeyers and Paasche variations are always the outer bounds of welfare estimates and consumer surplus is always the median estimate. The paper also introduces a new simple welfare approximation, clarifies the relation between Taylor's approximations and the income and substitution effects, and provides an example for treating nonlinear pricing. Stata codes for all computations are provided in annex.

Access to Markets --- Agriculture --- Choice --- Consumer Demand --- Consumer Preferences --- Consumer Surplus --- Consumers --- Consumption --- Cost of Living --- Data --- Demand --- Demand Curves --- Demand Function --- Developing Countries --- Distribution --- E-Business --- Econometrics --- Economic Research --- Economic Theory & Research --- Economics Literature --- Elasticity --- Electricity --- Emerging Markets --- Engel Curve --- Equity --- Exchange --- Expenditure --- Food Price --- Free Market --- Government Revenues --- Income --- Income Effects --- Index Numbers --- Information --- Interest --- International Economics & Trade --- Lorenz Curve --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Market Prices --- Markets & Market Access --- Money --- Nominal Income --- Normal Good --- Open Access --- Outputs --- Particular Country --- PC --- Price --- Price Adjustments --- Price Change --- Price Decreases --- Price Elasticity --- Price Increases --- Price Schedule --- Price Structure --- Price Variation --- Price_Index --- Pricing --- Private Sector Development --- Product --- Productivity --- Real Income --- Reliability --- Results --- Sales --- Savings --- Subsidies --- Substitute --- Substitute Goods --- Substitution --- Surplus --- Tax --- Tax Systems --- Transactions --- Utility --- Utility Function --- Utility Maximization --- Value --- Variables --- Wages --- Web --- Welfare --- Welfare Economics