Measuring Household Welfare: Short versus long consumption modules

The literature review mainly focuses on studies from the 1990s on developing countries. Available evidence seems to indicate that short modules underestimate consumption with respect to longer ones resulting in lower levels of recorded consumption and therefore less accurate estimates and higher poverty rates. However, one of the most complete, recent and authoritative studies in the field (Beegle et al., 2010) finds that short modules may actually result in a smaller downward bias compared to the benchmark than other longer consumption modules.