Database and Development Indicators

Building a Poverty Database

In its Poverty Reduction Strategy, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced its vision of an Asian and Pacific Region that is free of poverty. This vision required a reordering of priorities: from poverty reduction being just one of the five strategic objectives, to now being ADB's overarching goal.

The strategy committed ADB to implementing an accelerated program to strengthen its statistical database on poverty beginning in 2000. This regional technical assistance (RETA) was a major step toward building this database.

The specific objective was to build a poverty database system based, initially, on available data collected from ADB's poverty assessment activities, and from the borrowing countries and other international agencies. To meet this objective, existing poverty data from multiple sources have been collected, reviewed, and processed to determine relevant poverty-related indicators to support the ADB Poverty Reduction Strategy. The Poverty and Development Indicators Database is being developed as a web application, to be accessible soon on the Internet.

The project covered 18 countries chosen on the basis of magnitude and depth of poverty in the population, the relative size of ADB's assistance program, and the availability of poverty statistics or supporting primary data. These countries are: Bangladesh, Cambodia, People's Republic of China, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Republic of Korea, Kyrgyz Republic, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Viet Nam.

The RETA has two secondary but important benefits. The actual condition of the database in each country serves as a valuable input in preparing long-term plans for national statistical capacity building. The documentation of definitions and methods used by the countries to assess poverty, e.g., the estimation of poverty lines, provides useful directions for ADB's future work on proposing common concepts and methods that will be acceptable to the DMCs and that would advance regional comparability of poverty statistics.

Updating the database and expanding its coverage to all ADB developing member countries has become a regular activity at ADB.

More information and outputs of the project are available in the Poverty and Development Indicators section.