Rural Women and Food Production in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract

This chapter discusses a number of issues related to measuring poverty over time. It highlights some of the key normative decisions that have to be taken, in particular, the role of compensation over time (whether poverty spells can be compensated for by non-poverty spells); the issue of the discount rate (whether each spell should be given an equal weight); and the issue of the role of persistence (whether repeated spells should be given a higher weight). It offers a number of plausible poverty measures, each with different assumptions regarding these key issues, and shows how these insights can be used to construct a forward-looking measure of vulnerability. The chapter applies a number of these measures to data from rural Ethiopia, and shows that while correlations are high, there would still be considerable differences in ranking households by poverty according to different measures, especially those that have different views on the role of compensation