RR: Building a Robust Foundation for Measuring Material Wealth in Low- and Middle-Income Settings

一个家庭的经济状况是一系列政策相关成果的最有力和最一致的预测因素之一，这些成果包括儿童生长、成人营养状况、生育率以及认知功能和发展。在高收入环境中，家庭收入经常被用来衡量经济地位。然而，在低收入环境中，研究人员通常必须依靠基于一个家庭拥有什么和它可以获得什么基本服务的替代措施。每年，社会科学家和政策制定者都会进行数百项研究，利用这些以资产为基础的财富衡量标准来考察家庭经济地位如何影响人类发展，并评估扶贫工作和经济增长。然而，目前基于资产的衡量标准依赖于未经检验的假设，即家庭如何实现经济繁荣，以及在不同背景下是否存在多种经济发展途径。目前的项目将确定不同的基于资产的方法的有效性和稳健性，这些方法用于估计家庭财富，使用的样本代表了超过80%的世界现有人口。这将为在应用社会科学和公共政策领域（包括经济发展和人口健康领域）衡量家庭财富提供坚实的基础，这些领域往往依靠基于资产的措施来确定差距和风险人群。拟议的项目采用双管齐下的方法来评估哪些家庭财富指标最能反映与政策有关的成就基准。这些基准将包括身体发育、受教育程度、个人和社区满意度和相对经济地位的评估。在宏观层面，该项目是对一个正在进行的为期6年的项目的扩展，该项目对120多个低收入和中等收入国家的家庭财富指标进行了汇编和分析。在微观层面上，该项目侧重于几个在生计（农业、渔业、畜牧业、农村/城市雇佣劳动力）和文化背景方面各不相同的社区。该项目的研究结果和数据工具将为未来的研究人员评估既具有当地意义又具有广泛可比性的经济资源奠定基础，并可以提高我们对一系列社区中物质财富与人类成果之间联系的理解。

A household's economic status is one of the strongest and most consistent predictors of a range of policy-relevant outcomes - including child growth, adult nutritional status, fertility, and cognitive function and development. In high-income settings, household income is frequently used to measure economic status. However, in low-income settings, researchers usually must rely on alternative measures based on what a household owns and what basic services it has access to. Every year, hundreds of studies by social scientists and policymakers use these asset-based measures of wealth to examine how household economic status shapes human development and to evaluate poverty alleviation efforts and economic growth. However, current asset-based measures rely on untested assumptions about how households can reach economic prosperity and whether there are multiple pathways to economic advancement in different contexts. The current project will determine the validity and robustness of different asset-based methods for estimating household wealth using samples representing over 80% of the world's current population. This will provide a robust foundation for the measurement of household wealth in applied social science and public policy fields, including economic development and population health, which frequently rely on asset-based measures for identifying disparities and at-risk populations.The proposed project takes a two-pronged approach to assess which measures of household wealth best capture policy-relevant benchmarks of achievement. Such benchmarks will include physical growth, educational attainment, and personal and community assessments of satisfaction and relative economic standing. At a macro-level, the project expands on an ongoing 6-year project compiling and analyzing household wealth measures in over 120 low- and middle-income countries. At a micro-level, the project focuses on several communities that vary in terms of livelihood - farming, fishing, livestock, and rural/urban wage labor - and cultural background. The findings and data tools from the project will build a foundation for future researchers to assess economic resources that are both locally meaningful and broadly comparable and that can improve our understanding of the linkages of material wealth with human outcomes across a range of communities.