Indicators for measuring changes in income, food availability and consumption, and the natural resource base

This report documents the findings of a workshop held in 1988 to identify a set of simple, practical indicators for monitoring the impact of A.I.D."s agricultural and rural development assistance. Three groups of indicators are discussed: (1) indicators to measure income change, e.g., macro-level indicators such as GNP and GDP and micro-level indicators such as household income and expenditures and indicators of intrahousehold income distribution; (2) indicators to measure changes in food consumption, e.g., per capita calorie intake, food expenditures, and market availability and prices, as well as anthropometric indicators such as weight at birth; and (3) natural resource indicators, including indicators of topsoil erosion, crop yield, actual land use versus soil suitability, surface and groundwater pollution, and the status of rangelands, forests, and wetlands. Good indicators, according to workshop participants, should provide valid measures, be reliable, sensitive to change, replicable, and based on easily accessible data; they should also be measurable quickly and cost-effectively, and be easily understood by policymakers. The attempt to measure impact indicators for every project was agreed to be impractical; instead, program assessments should be based on impact measurements from a sample of projects and on key qualitative studies.