M
any developing countries
are faced with
the
issue
that household surveys are conducted
on
a
more
infrequent
basis
relative to the demand for
regular poverty estimates
. Labor force surveys
are howe
ver available more frequently. T
o take advantage of this, we apply
a new
imputation
technique to provide predicted poverty rates combining the Household Expenditure and Income
Survey (HEIS) and the Employment and Unemployment Survey (EUS) for Jordan. Our
preliminary predicted poverty rates based on the EUS s
urveys closely track the true poverty rates
based on the HEIS surveys for 2008 and 2010. Furthermore, we provide updated poverty
numbers for 2011 and 2012 based on the EUSs. These results point to both a new tool to monitor
poverty trends for Jordan as we
ll as a potentially widespread application of this method to other
contexts. We provide a discussion of the underlying assumption for effective implementation of
this method, and propose a step
-
by
-
step procedure by which consistent estimates can be
obtaine
d. We also discuss the remaining issues and challenges that we need to overcome to
improve our estimation.