Person:
Lanjouw, Peter Frederik
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Poverty and Inequality Analysis; Rural Development; Small Area Estimation; Village Studies
Degrees
Departments
Poverty and Inequality Team, Development Economics Research Group, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Peter Lanjouw, a Dutch national, is Research Manager of the Poverty and Inequality Team in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Amsterdam Institute of International Development, Netherlands. He completed his Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1992. From August 2003 until August 2005, he was a visiting scholar at the Agriculture and Resource Economics department at UC Berkeley, and he held the appointment of Professor of Economics at the VU University of Amsterdam between September 1998 and May 2000. He has taught in the Masters in Development Economics program at the University of Namur, Belgium and has also taught at the Foundation for the Advanced Study of International Development in Tokyo, Japan. His research focuses on various aspects of poverty and inequality measurement as well as on rural development issues.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 28
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Publication
How Good a Map? Putting Small Area Estimation to the Test
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-03)The authors examine the performance of small area welfare estimation. The method combines census and survey data to produce spatially disaggregated poverty and inequality estimates. To test the method, they compare predicted welfare indicators for a set of target populations with their true values. They construct target populations using actual data from a census of households in a set of rural Mexican communities. They examine estimates along three criteria: accuracy of confidence intervals, bias, and correlation with true values. The authors find that while point estimates are very stable, the precision of the estimates varies with alternative simulation methods. While the original approach of numerical gradient estimation yields standard errors that seem appropriate, some computationally less-intensive simulation procedures yield confidence intervals that are slightly too narrow. The precision of estimates is shown to diminish markedly if unobserved location effects at the village level are not well captured in underlying consumption models. With well specified models there is only slight evidence of bias, but the authors show that bias increases if underlying models fail to capture latent location effects. Correlations between estimated and true welfare at the local level are highest for mean expenditure and poverty measures and lower for inequality measures. -
Publication
Simulating the Impact of Geographic Targeting on Poverty Alleviation in Morocco : What Are the Gains from Disaggregation?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-09)The authors employ the recently completed "poverty map" for Morocco, referring to the year 2004, as a tool for an ex-ante evaluation of the distributional incidence of geographic targeting of public resources. They simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined sub-groups of the population according to their relative poverty status. In both rural and urban areas, the findings reveal large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as communes or districts. However, these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. The results indicate that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms. -
Publication
Imputed Welfare Estimates in Regression Analysis
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-04)The authors discuss the use of imputed data in regression analysis, in particular the use of highly disaggregated welfare indicators (from so-called "poverty maps"). They show that such indicators can be used both as explanatory variables on the right-hand side and as the phenomenon to explain on the left-hand side. The authors try out practical ways of adjusting standard errors of the regression coefficients to reflect the error introduced by using imputed, rather than actual, welfare indicators. These are illustrated by regression experiments based on data from Ecuador. For regressions with imputed variables on the left-hand side, the authors argue that essentially the same aggregate relationships would be found with either actual or imputed variables. They address the methodological question of how to interpret aggregate relationships found in such regressions. -
Publication
Non-Farm Diversification, Poverty, Economic Mobility and Income Inequality : A Case Study in Village India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05)This paper assembles data at the all-India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence, of the non-farm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined National Sample Survey and Palanpur data is of a slow process of non-farm diversification, whose distributional incidence, on the margin, is increasingly pro-poor. The village-level analysis documents that the non-farm sector is not only increasing incomes and reducing poverty, but appears as well to be breaking down long-standing barriers to mobility among the poorest segments of rural society. Efforts by the government of India to accelerate the process of diversification could thus yield significant returns in terms of declining poverty and increased income mobility. The evidence from Palanpur also shows, however, that at the village-level a significant increase in income inequality has accompanied diversification away from the farm. A growing literature argues that such a rise in inequality could affect the fabric of village society, the way in which village institutions function and evolve, and the scope for collective action at the village level. Failure to keep such inequalities in check could thus undermine the pro-poor impacts from the process of structural transformation currently underway in rural India. -
Publication
Poverty Alleviation through Geographic Targeting: How Much Does Disaggregation Help?
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-10)Using recently completed "poverty maps" for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, the authors simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined subgroups of the population according to their relative poverty status. They find large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as districts or villages. But these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. The results suggest that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms. -
Publication
Measuring Poverty Dynamics with Synthetic Panels Based on Cross-Sections
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06)Panel data conventionally underpin the analysis of poverty mobility over time. However, such data are not readily available for most developing countries. Far more common are the “snap-shots” of welfare captured by cross-section surveys. This paper proposes a method to construct synthetic panel data from cross sections which can provide point estimates of poverty mobility. In contrast to traditional pseudo-panel methods that require multiple rounds of cross-sectional data to study poverty at the cohort level, the proposed method can be applied to settings with as few as two survey rounds and also permits investigation at the more disaggregated household level. The procedure is implemented using cross-section survey data from several countries, spanning different income levels and geographical regions. Estimates fall within the 95 percent confidence interval— or even one standard error in many cases—of those based on actual panel data. The method is not only restricted to studying poverty mobility but can also accommodate investigation of other welfare outcome dynamics. -
Publication
Poverty in India during the 1990s : A Regional Perspective
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-10)The authors provide estimates of poverty at the regional level in India, spanning the 1990s. Such estimates have not been previously available due to concerns regarding non-comparability of the 1993-94 and 1999-2000 National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) household survey data. They implement an adjustment procedure to restore comparability based on a methodology developed by Elbers and others (2003). The results indicate a less rapid decline of poverty, at the all-India level than has been suggested by Deaton and Dre (2002), based on a related adjustment methodology. The authors attempt to uncover the source of disagreement across these procedures, by probing a number of their underlying assumptions. -
Publication
Poverty, Education, and Health in Indonesia : Who Benefits from Public Spending?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-12)The authors investigate the extent to which Indonesia's poor benefit from public and private provisioning of education and health services. Drawing on multiple rounds of SUSENAS household surveys, they document a reversal in the rate of decline in poverty and a slowdown in social sector improvements resulting from the economic crisis in the second half of the 1990s. Carrying out traditional static benefit-incidence analysis of public spending in education and health, the authors find patterns consistent with experience in other countries: spending on primary education and primary health care tends to be pro-poor, while spending on higher education and hospitals is less obviously beneficial to the poor. These conclusions are tempered once one allows for economies of scale in consumption which weaken the link between poverty status and household size. The authors also examine the incidence of changes in government spending. They find that the marginal incidence of spending in both junior and senior secondary schooling is more progressive than what static analysis would suggest, consistent with "early capture" by the non-poor of education spending. In the health sector marginal and average incidence analysis point to the same conclusion: the greatest benefit to the poor would come from an increase in primary health care spending. -
Publication
Is There a Metropolitan Bias? The Relationship between Poverty and City Size in a Selection of Developing Countries
(Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2012-11)This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage and solid waste disposal. We illustrate for one country – Morocco – that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper hinge on a specific definition of “urban area”; are driven by differences in the cost of living across city-size categories; by reliance on an income-based concept of well-being; or by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level. -
Publication
Brazil's Bolsa Escola Program : The Role of Local Governance in Decentralized Implementation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-12)This study analyzes the role of local governance in the implementation of Bolsa Escola, a decentralized conditional cash transfer program for child education in Brazil. It is based on a survey of 260 municipalities in four states of the Northeast. The analysis focuses on program implementation. Results show that there was considerable confusion over the municipality s role in beneficiary selection and consequently much heterogeneity in implementation across municipalities. Social control councils as direct accountability mechanisms were often not in place and poorly informed, weakening their role. However, electoral support for incumbent mayors rewarded larger program coverage, presence of councils, and low leakages of benefits to the non-poor.