Tools

POVCAL — An easy to use and reliable tool for calculating poverty and inequality measures from grouped distributional data. This web site contains the free software (available for downloading), an overview of the tool, usage instructions, sample data and analysis, and references to literature for further information. The DOS-based program can be used to simulate what happens to poverty indicators when consumption increases by a certain amount, with or without changes in inequality.

PovcalNet — An interactive computational tool that allows you to replicate the calculations made by the World Bank’s researchers in estimating the extent of absolute poverty in the world ($1 a day). It also allows you to calculate the poverty measures under different assumptions and to assemble the estimates using alternative country groupings or for any set of individual countries of your choosing. PovcalNet is self-contained.

Poverty Analysis Toolkit — This site provides the STATA .ado programs to perform growth-inequality and sectoral decompositions of poverty between two periods of time. Moreover, the program GICURVE produces the growth incidence curve and calculates the rate of pro-poor growth.

DAD: A Software for Distributive Analysis / Analyse Distributive — This freely available software program enables comparison of living standards, social welfare, poverty, and inequality across distributions, and performs various statistical functions. This web site contains the software, a user's and conceptual manual, and a presentation of sample applications.

PovSTAT — an Excel based program that produces forecasts that vary by level of complexity depending on the availability of reliable data for the post survey period and on the extent to which various factors influencing poverty levels are incorporated. You will find a chapter describing the tool, as well as a file with the program itself.

SimSIP Poverty (not available online) — an Excel based program that enables the user to make poverty and inequality comparisons between sectors and over time.

Guide to Tools for Analyzing Survey Data — This web site contains a number of data analysis tools for use with household data sets, especially the Living Standard Measurement Study, LSMS.

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