If the main objective of poverty measurement is to inform policy choices for reducing absolute poverty across space and over time, then the current practice to poverty comparison falls short of adequately informing those choices. What is known, based on official poverty data, about spatial poverty profiles, as well as poverty changes in recent years, is not quite robust. This paper suggests an alternative, albeit practical, approach to measuring poverty for spatial/subgroup comparison, as well as for performance monitoring purposes. It employs this approach to construct new poverty profiles based on nationwide household surveys covering late 1990s. Using this panel data constructed from these surveys, the paper also examines the influence of pre-crisis living standards and certain household attributes on the impact of, and household responses, to the Asian Economic Crisis.
