Stata in the measurement and analysis of poverty in Mexico

Abstract

Following the General Law of Social Development, the National Council of Evaluation of Social Development Policy (the acronym for its name in Spanish is CONEVAL) has the responsibility to establish the criteria to define, identify, and measure poverty in Mexico. To develop this assignment, CONEVAL primarily uses the information from censuses and surveys carried out by the National Institute of Statistics (INEGI). This type of data usually requires the intensive use of statistical software, which facilitates its analysis; in this way, Stata is the prime tool to elaborate work on poverty. Among the principal products that CONEVAL has presented using Stata as a platform are: 1) an income poverty measure from 1992 to 2006, 2) an estimation of the Social Gap Index 2005, and 3) all the data at the Executive Report of Poverty, Mexico 2007. As well, the versatility of Stata allowed us to process all the census data to develop Income Poverty Maps 2000–2005. The primary objective of this presentation is to exemplify how we have used Stata to estimate and analyze poverty in CONEVAL’s publications.