How Big a Problem Is Access for the Poor?

Abstract

The first step in refining the evidence on an access problem and in particular testing the extent to which the poor are worse off than the rest of the population is to try to unbundle the data on access rate in infrastructure into income, consumption, or wealth groups. This raises a significant issue. The data on income and consumption are not available for all countries on a comparable basis. Fortunately, data on access by level of wealth can be provided and the sample is large enough to generate a relatively reliable sense of the level and distribution of access rates for the various infrastructure sectors across wealth groups.