Smoothing Sporadic Poverty and Inequality Estimates: Pakistan, 1985-2016

Poverty and income inequality is estimated from household surveys which provide detailed information on household income and consumption along with socio-economic characteristics. However, these surveys are conducted sporadically with irregular intervals. Thus the resultant estimates are not in the form of a continuous time-series, which is a prerequisite for a rigorous analysis of the relationship between macro variables and the estimates of poverty and inequality in the national context. To cater to the need of researchers and students, this research provides a continuous time-series of poverty incidence and the various measures of income inequality for the period 1985-2016 after applying the interpolation techniques on sporadic counts. These series are then used to explore the relationship between poverty, inequality and growth