An online interactive tool for monitoring global poverty
MPAT is a user-friendly assisting tool that calculates money-metric poverty measures, having as input variables that are normally found in economic related surveys, such as household income expenditure surveys.
The data are compiled by ESCWA from various sources and aggregated at the country level.
The poverty measures are found in the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) class, as it has some desirable properties (such as additive decomposability) and include some widely used poverty measures (such as the headcount and the poverty gap measure), along with the elasticity of the poverty measures to the mean income and Gini index.
Some parametric assumptions need to be considered when applying the FGT class, and it is related to the Lorenz curve estimation.
In this tool two of the best performers, namely the general quadratic (GQ) Lorenz curve (Villasenor and Arnold 1984, 1989) and what may be called the Beta Lorenz curve (Kakwani 1980).
Additionally, plots to highlight the poverty measures, are added to help the user interpret the results, and these are:
Lorenz curve (from one or several surveys)
Bar chart for headcount ratio estimates (from one or several surveys)