IARIW-TNBS Conference on Measurement of Income, Wealth and Well-being in Africa

IARIW-TNBS Conference on Measurement of Income, Wealth and Well-being in Africa

Pre-conference training session on Income and Wealth Measurement in Household Surveys

On November 10th, 2022, the World Bank Center for Development Data (C4D2), IARIW, and Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics hosted a training session on the measurement of income and wealth in household surveys in Arusha, Tanzania.

This session's goal is to train graduate students, junior national statistics office (NSO) staff and other survey practitioners, as well as early career researchers in survey methods, in the fundamentals of collecting and analyzing information on household income and wealth via household surveys.

The training preceded the special conference on “Measuring Income, Wealth and Well-being in Africa”, hosted on November 11-13, 2022 by the IARIW, in partnership with the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics (TNBS).

The objective of this event is to advance our understanding of issues related to measuring national accounts, prices, productivity, income and wealth distribution, poverty, and economic well-being in the countries of Africa through an examination of past experiences related to the measurement of trends in these variables and the identification of future measurement challenges.

Given the growing need for collection of high-quality information on household income and welfare coupled with the lack of experience and expertise in its collection within developing countries, C4D2 is strongly committed to fill this gap.

The C4D2 training initiative, conducted in partnership with several Italian organizations and African institutions, aims at improving and harmonizing the curricula of seven African regional statistical training centers, facilitating the uptake of global standards and best practices in household survey design, creating a network of household survey experts at the regional level, and promoting harmonization across countries.

Under the training initiative, which adopts a training of trainers’ approach, C4D2 has organized training programs and workshops in several thematic areas, the latest of which is a training program on measurement of household income and wealth. The focus of the training session is on the theoretical underpinnings, practical considerations, best practices and ongoing challenges in the collection of information on income and wealth via household surveys.

Chair: Gero Carletto (Living Standards Measurement Study, World Bank)

9.00-11.00 Measuring welfare, trade-offs and complementarities: Income, wealth and consumption (Giovanni Vecchi, University of Rome Tor Vergata)

11.00-11.30 COFFEE

11.30-1.00 Issues in the measurement of Wealth (Giovanni D’Alessio, Bank of Italy and Center for Development Data)

1.00-2.00 LUNCH

2.00-3.30 Adjusting for prices and household size composition (Dean Jolliffe, World Bank)

3.30-4.00 COFFEE

4.00 – 5.30 Perspectives from LIS: Challenges in integrating and harmonizing high- and low-income country data (Teresa Munzi, Luxembourg Income Study)

Speakers Bios

• Dean Jolliffe is a Lead Economist in the Development Data Group of the World Bank and member of the LSMS-ISA team. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of household surveys and is currently managing ongoing LSMS-ISA work in Ethiopia. He has also worked in the South Asia region at the Bank on poverty assessments for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. 

• Giovanni D’Alessio is a Lead Statistician in the Rome’s Center for Development Data (C4D2) on secondment from the Bank of Italy where he was a manager in the Statistical Analysis Directorate. As the Head of Sample Survey Division of the Bank of Italy from 2001 to 2015 he has been responsible for the Survey of Household Income and Wealth and other surveys. He is author of several research papers on the measurement of economic well-being and on income and wealth distribution. 

• Teresa Munzi is the Director of Operations of the LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg. She has extensive experience in the harmonization of income microdata with a view to enable cross-national comparative research on the well-being of households. Following recent developments at LIS, she is currently concentrating on the comparability between high- and low-income countries.

• Giovanni Vecchi currently works at the Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, University of Rome Tor Vergata. Giovanni does research in Development Economics, Economic History and Welfare Economics. He is the author of numerous publication on welfare, poverty and inequality, including most recently the book On the Construction of a Consumption Aggregate for Inequality and Poverty Analysis. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group, 2022 (with Giulia Mancini).