HARDSHIP AT LOCAL AREA COUNCIL LEVEL IN VANUATU
Introduction
Poverty has been one of the main priorities in international and national agendas for decades, and it is the first goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The defined goal is to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere”. In line with the time frame of the 2030 Agenda, the current National Sustainable Development Plan (NSDP) of Vanuatu: Vanuatu 2020 The Peoples Plan is the main high-level policy framework of the country (Department of Strategic Policy, Planning and Aid Coordination of Vanuatu, 2017). Within this plan, the Vanuatu National Statistics Office (VNSO) carries out various statistical operations such as the 2020 National Population and Housing Census (NPHC) and the 2019-2020 NSDP Baseline Survey that provide relevant information on its population.While the NSDP focuses on food poverty, the VNSO also reports the poverty headcount ratio based on a national poverty line as stated in the SDG indicator 1.2.1. The national poverty line is defined following the cost of basic needs approach. Vanuatu can be divided into rural and urban areas, six provinces, and 66 local area councils. For the provinces disaggregated by urban and rural, direct estimates of the poverty headcount ratio are presented in VNSO (2021c).
The estimates reveal, for example, that the capital Port Vila has a very low poverty rate below 1%. Furthermore, the poverty rates in rural provinces range from 10.7 to 35.3%.To have better insights on the geographical distribution of poverty, disaggregated information at high geographical granularity is needed. Poverty estimates at the local area council level were last reported in the Socio-Economic Atlas (The World Bank, 2014). This Socio-Economic Atlas was prepared primarily with data from the 2009 census; however, the census did not contain income or expenditure variables, so producing poverty information based on a poverty line methodology was not straightforward. Thus, a small area estimation (SAE) approach was applied for the estimation of the poverty headcount ratio in 2014. SAE approaches are commonly applied for the estimation of indicators in domains with potentially small sample sizes. Instead of only using one data source, e.g., survey data, two or more data sources are combined by a model.
Therefore, this report provides updated estimates for poverty rates at the local area council level in Vanuatu. Similarly as in the Socio – Economic Atlas published in 2014, a SAE method is applied by combining the most recent census (2020 NPHC) and the 2019-2020 NSDP Baseline Survey. In this report, the census pseudo empirical best (CPEB) estimator introduced by (Guadarrama et al., 2018) and mentioned in (Corral et al., 2022) is used in order to increase the efficiency of the estimates compared to estimates that are solely based on the survey data, i.e., direct estimates. The methodology is adjusted by the recommendation in the World Bank guidelines (Corral et al., 2022) to use expansion factors to conclude individual poverty estimates. Please note that the VNSO rather refers to hardship than to poverty. Thus, we will use the terms interchangeably.
The report is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the geographical division, the data sources and potential variables. In Section 3, the modeling approach is explained. Section 4 describes the model selection procedure. The results of the application of the model are shown in Section 5. Section 6 concludes.