Guidelines to Small Area Estimation for Poverty Mapping

Luis Felipe López-Calva is the Global Director for the World Bank Group’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice (GP) in the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions (EFI) Vice Presidency.

López-Calva has over 25 years of professional experience working with international institutions and advising national governments. He rejoined the World Bank in 2022 from the United Nations Development Programme, where he served as UN Assistant Secretary General and Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean since 2018.

In his previous tenure at the World Bank, he held various positions including Practice Manager of the Poverty and Equity GP for Europe and Central Asia, Co-Director of the World Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law, Lead Economist and Regional Poverty Advisor in the Poverty and Equity GP for Europe and Central Asia, and Lead Economist in the Poverty, Equity and Gender Unit in the PREM Directorate for Latin America and the Caribbean.

López-Calva is a Board Member at the Global Development Network (GDN) and a Fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association.

His research interests focus on labor markets, poverty and inequality, institutions, and the microeconomics of development. He has published extensively on these issues in peer-reviewed academic journals, books, and policy reports. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Boston University, as well as a Master’s and a PhD in Economics from Cornell University.

Paul Corral is a senior economist with the West Africa team of the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. He is currently the poverty economist for Ghana and lives in Accra, Ghana. Paul’s research interests hover around small area estimation, agricultural development, and human capital accumulation. He is the author and co-author of multiple Stata commands, including Stata’s SAE package. He holds a PhD in economics from American University and an MSc degree in agricultural economics from the University of Hohenheim.

Isabel Molina is an Associate Professor at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at Complutense University of Madrid. She holds a PhD in Statistics and Operations Research from Miguel Hernández University. Her main research areas include small area estimation, especially with application to poverty mapping, linear and generalized linear mixed models, survey methodology and resampling techniques (bootstrap). She has published over 40 peer-revieweed papers on these topics and is currently a member of the editorial board of the scientific journal Survey Methodology. She is coauthor with J.N.K. Rao of the 2nd edition of the Wiley book “Small Area Estimation”.

Anna Wellenstein is the Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean in the World Bank’s Sustainable Development Practice Group. Ms. Wellenstein is responsible for the World Bank’s agriculture, climate, disaster risk management, environment, land, social, urban, and water portfolios in the region.

Prior to this, Ms. Wellenstein was Director for Strategy and Operations of the World Bank’s Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice, where she oversaw $25 billion in lending to developing countries in over 200 projects, 325 studies and technical assistance projects.

Anna has over 20 years of experience in sustainable development. She has led efforts to design and finance investments, facilitate policy reforms, and build capacity to help countries reduce poverty, foster shared prosperity and increase sustainability. She has been responsible for technical oversight of projects financed by the World Bank and setting sector and country strategies. She has developed strong partnerships with governments, development agencies and academia.

She studied Economics at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, a Master’s in Economics at El Colegio de México and a PhD in Economic History at the Harvard University.

Between 1998 and 2018 she was a research professor in El Colegio de México. She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the University of California San Diego. Her main research topics are trade policy, industrialization in comparative perspective, inequality, and economic developments.

From December 2018 to December 2020, she served as Minister of Economics at the Federal Government, being the first woman in the history of the country to rule the Ministry. During her tenure, the USMCA entered into force, the front-of-package labeling system in food products was promoted and the patent and brand system and the legal framework of official norms were updated.

Derived from the proposal of the President of Mexico, from January 2022, Dra. Márquez was ratificated by the Senate of the Republic as the President of INEGI for the period 2022-2027.

Professor Samuel Kobina Annim is a Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Coast (UCC) and the Government Statistician of the Republic of Ghana. His area of academic interest is Micro-Development Economics and Applied Micro-Econometrics.

At the Ghana Statistical Service his leadership has been geared towards country specificity and user satisfaction through an expansion of the scope and diversity of statistics for national and international development. The anchoring pillars of his national duty in the last three and half years have been Change, Automation and Newness.

Among his recent accomplishments are the conduct of Ghana’s first digital Population and Housing Census, maiden use of Computer Assisted Telephone Interview during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploration of diverse non-traditional data sources and collection of the Services’ first nation-wide panel data on livelihoods.

Gallina A. Vincelette is the World Bank’s Country Director for the European Union (EU), based in Brussels, Belgium. She is responsible for guiding the Bank’s operational and knowledge engagement with client countries and the EU institutions.

Prior to her position in Brussels, Ms. Vincelette was Practice Manager for Macroeconomics, Trade, & Investment in the Europe and Central Asia region of the World Bank. She was responsible for leading the analytical work and lending on macroeconomic and economic policy issues in the Western Balkans, the EU, and Eastern Europe.

Ms. Vincelette joined the Bank in 2005 as a Young Professional. Since then, she has worked on economic development issues in a range of low-, middle- and high-income countries around the world. Her professional interests relate to the topics of economic growth, public debt, fiscal policy, and macroeconomic vulnerabilities. She has published multiple works on these topics in international peer-reviewed journals and co-authored books on economic development and transition economics. Prior to joining the Bank, Ms. Vincelette conducted research in academic institutions in Europe and the US.