Subnational Poverty Estimates for Latin America

Abstract

Subnational poverty maps are used by governments to design, implement and monitor development policies more effectively by targeting them to the places or population groups that need them most urgently. This note describes the poverty mapping methodology based on small-area estimation methods, as used by the Statistics Division of ECLAC.

The methodology makes it possible to combine census information with household survey data to make estimations at the provincial, communal, or municipal levels, for which direct estimates from household surveys are generally too imprecise. This note illustrates the results obtained with this methodology for Chile, Colombia, and Peru.