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 - 2 of 2
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Publication
The Interplay of Regional and Ethnic Inequalities in Malaysian Poverty Dynamics
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01)This study employs a synthetic panel approach based on nationally representative micro-level data to track poverty and income mobility in Malaysia in 2004–16. On aggregate, there were large reductions in chronic poverty and increases in persistent economic security, but those who remained poor in 2016 were increasingly likely to be poor in a structural sense. Further, the poverty and income dynamics differ notably across geographic dimensions. Such disparities are most striking when comparing affluent urban Peninsular Malaysia with poorer rural East Malaysia. Although there are important differences in welfare levels between the main ethnic groups in Malaysia, the mobility trends generally point in the same direction. While the findings show that there is still scope for poverty reduction through the reduction of interethnic inequalities, the study underscores the importance of taking regional inequalities into account to ensure a fairer distribution of socioeconomic opportunities for poor and vulnerable Malaysians. Hence, addressing chronic poverty is likely to require additional attention to less developed geographic areas, as a complement to the current policies that are largely ethnicity-based. -
Publication
How Accurate Is a Poverty Map Based on Remote Sensing Data?: An Application to Malawi
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09)This paper assesses the reliability of poverty maps derived from remote-sensing data. Employing data for Malawi, it first obtains small area estimates of poverty by combining the Malawi household expenditure survey from 2010/11 with unit record population census data from 2008. It then ignores the population census data and obtains a second poverty map for Malawi by combining the survey data with predictors of poverty derived from remote sensing data. This allows for a clean comparison between the two poverty maps. The findings are encouraging - although that assessment depends somewhat on the evaluation criteria employed. The two approaches reveal the same patterns in the geography of poverty. However, there are instances where the two approaches obtain markedly different estimates of poverty. Poverty maps obtained using remote sensing data may do well when the decision maker is interested in comparisons of poverty between assemblies of areas, yet may be less reliable when the focus is on estimates for specific small areas.