Household Surveys

New work uses household survey data from India and Indonesia to calculate purchasing power parity exchange rates. "Purchasing Power Parity Exchange Rates from Household Survey Data" (Revised 5/04), our first paper on the topic, finds that the official PPP rates from the Penn World Table, and from the World Bank, present a seriously misleading picture of comparative living standards in the two countries.

My book, The Analysis of Household Surveys, was published in 1997, and is available from bookstores and the World Bank InfoShop. It has lots of useful information about how household surveys are done, and on how to use them. Although it focuses on developing countries, most of the issues apply to the analysis of household surveys wealthy countries too.

The STATA code used in my book is also available on the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) webpage. The World Bank Publications also has a number of links to my papers for them, many of which are LSMS working papers.

Two more recent papers on household surveys and the LSMS are:

"Guidelines for Constructing Consumption Aggregates for Welfare Analysis" (with Salman Zaidi)
2002, Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper: 135, v. 104, pp. xi, Washington, D.C.: The World Bank

"Consumption" (with Margaret Grosh)
Chapter 5 in Grosh and Glewwe (eds.), Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries: Lessons from Ten Years of LSMS Experience, 2000, pp. 91-133

More Information:
Angus Deaton's Full List of Working Papers and Publications
Research Program in Development Studies Working Papers
Center for Health and Wellbeing Working Papers