On 5^th June 2024, Wednesday, BIDS organised a seminar titled “Comparing Apples to Apples: Rebuilding 2010-2022 Poverty and Inequality Trends in Bangladesh via Statistical Matching”. In this seminar, a presentation was delivered by Sergio Olivieri, Senior Economist, Poverty and Equity Global Practice of the World Bank. The seminar was held in the BIDS conference room.

During the presentation, Sergio Olivieri highlighted the critical need for comparable consumption aggregates in analyzing poverty and extreme poverty headcounts as well as inequality measures over time. He showed that The HIES 2022 enhances fieldwork, data management, and information quality but poses comparability challenges with previous rounds of HIES’s. The World Bank study team used a two-step process based on statistical matching to fill the information gap in previous rounds of HIES. This allows for a consistent assessment of poverty and inequality measures, providing insights into the changes for policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders over the years. The results reveal that integrating this correction into previous survey rounds would have reduced poverty rates by around 10.6 percentage points between 2010 and 2016 and a further decrease of 7.8 percentage points between 2016 and 2022. Likewise, extreme poverty rates would have witnessed a decline of approximately 3 percentage points in the earlier period and a more substantial drop of 3.6 percentage points in the more recent one. These poverty reduction trends mirror improvements in other dimensions of well-being, like reductions in infant mortality and stunting and increases in access to electricity, sanitary toilets, and literacy rates.

The seminar began at 2:30 PM and concluded at 5:00 PM. Following Sergio Olivieri's hour-long presentation, the floor was opened to the participants at the venue. Dr. Mashiur Rahman, Economic Affairs Adviser to the Honorable Prime Minister, Govt. of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was also present in the seminar. Dr. Binayak Sen, Director General of BIDS, moderated the seminar and delivered the closing remarks.

Meeting recording link here