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Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the contrary holds and that the national poverty line is more appropriate for comparing living standards among the poor, at least under prevailing conditions in Mozambique and Ghana. The problem lies in the risk of downscaling the burden associated with cheap-calorie diets and the low nonfood component of the rural poor. The paper illustrates how observed behavior may neither reveal preferences nor detect heterogeneous preferences among the poor. Rather, the consumption pattern is the upshot of the poverty condition itself. Poverty is confused with preferences if observed cheap-calorie diets are seen as a matter of taste, whereas in fact they reflect a lack of means to consume a preferred diet of higher quality, as food Engel curve estimates indicate. Likewise, a smaller nonfood component is not a matter of a particular distaste, but an adaptation to the fact that various nonfood items (such as transport) and basic services (such as electricity and health) are simply absent in rural areas.

Food & Beverage Industry --- Food Engel-Curve --- Heterogeneous Preferences --- Poverty --- Poverty Lines --- Revealed Preferences --- Rural Poverty Reduction

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Frequent measurement of poverty is challenging, as measurement often relies on complex and expensive expenditure surveys that try to measure expenditures on a comprehensive consumption aggregate. This paper investigates the use of consumption "sub-aggregates" instead. The use of consumption sub-aggregates is theoretically justified if and only if all the Engel curves are linear for any realization of prices. This is very stringent. However, it may be possible to empirically identify certain goods that happen to have linear Engel curves given prevailing prices, and when the effect of price changes is small, such a sub-aggregate might work in practice. The paper constructs such linear sub-aggregates using data from Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. The findings show that using sub-aggregates is ill-advised in practice as well as in theory. This raises questions about the consistency of the poverty-tracking efforts currently applied across countries, since obtaining exhaustive consumption measures remains an unmet challenge.

Consumption --- Consumption Sub-Aggregate --- Engel Curve --- Living Standards --- Poverty Assessment --- Poverty Lines --- Poverty Measurement --- Poverty Monitoring and Analysis --- Poverty Reduction

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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