STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF RELATIVE WEALTH INDICES DERIVED FROM BIG DATA
Sartirano D, Kalimeri K, Cattuto C, Delamònica E, Garcia-Herranz M, Mockler A, Paolotti D, Schifanella R
Accurate relative wealth estimates in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICS) are crucial to help policymakers address socio-demographic inequalities under the guidance of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations.
In this work, we focus on the case of Indonesia, and examine one frontier-data derived Relative Wealth Index (RWI), created by the Facebook Data for Good initiative, that utilizes connectivity data from the Facebook Platform and satellite imagery data to produce a high-resolution estimate of wealth for 135 countries. We examine it in relation to asset-based relative wealth indices estimated from existing high quality national level traditional survey instruments, the USAID-developed Demographic Health Survey (DHS) and the Indonesian National Socio-economic survey (SUSENAS).