Recent years have seen widespread use of small-area maps based on census data enriched by relationships estimated from household surveys that predict variables, such as income, not covered by the census. The purpose is to obtain putatively precise estimates of poverty and inequality for small areas for which no or few observations are available in the survey. We argue that to usefully match survey and census data in this way requires a degree of spatial homogeneity for which the method provides no basis and which is unlikely to be satisfied in practice. We document the potential empirical relevance of such concerns using data from the 2000 census of Mexico.

The extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years. Although there are better data than ever before, controversies are not resolved. A major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys, which is used to measure poverty, grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts, in the world as a whole and in large countries, particularly India, China, and the United States. In consequence, measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries. One plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys. But growth in the national accounts is also upward biased, and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys. So it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption, without any increase in measured inequality. Current statistical procedures in poor countries understate the rate of global poverty reduction, and overstate growth in the world.

The lifecycle theory of saving and consumption predicts that changes in an economy's rate of economic growth will affect its aggregate saving rate by changing the lifetime resources of younger people relative to older people. However, studies that track the saving behavior of cohorts of household heads over time as they age have yielded estimates of age-saving profiles that are too flat for growth to have much effect on the aggregate saving rate. One problem with the cohort approach is that multigenerational households are common in many counties, and the age-saving profiles of households may be quite different from the age-saving profiles of individuals that make up households. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating individual age-saving profiles using household data. This method is applied to data from Taiwan and Thailand. We find that the individual method yields results that are more favorable to the lifecycle model. These results imply that changes in the rate of economic growth may in some circumstances have large effects on the aggregate saving rate. However, the size and sign of these effects depends on the rate of economic growth and the rate of population growth, and in many cases the effect of growth on saving is small.