Poverty in Tanzania: comparisons across administrative regions

Ranking poverty in Tanzanian administrative regions

This paper is an interim report on a three pronged research project. The project’s overarching objectives are:

to rank the administrative regions in Tanzania on the basis of poverty
to use stochiastic dominance test to check the consistency of previous rankings. A stochiastic dominance test checks whether moving the poverty line within a certain range would drastically change the region’s poverty ranking
to undertake a multidimensional poverty analysis by region to see how a welfarist approach compares to other poverty measures

The primary finding of this study is that different measures of expenditure yield different poverty indices. The author concludes:

the poverty indices used to rank regions did not withstand stochiastic dominance checks, casting doubt on the usefulness of a single poverty index used to create poverty rankings

poverty rankings are subjective; the authors suggest that there need to be more commonly adopted multidimensional poverty measures

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Poverty in Tanzania: comparisons across administrative regions