Welcome to Fantasyland. Comparing Approaches to Land Area Measurement in Household Surveys
Carletto, Calogero et al.
The importance of accurate land area measurement in surveys in developing countries cannot be overstated. In rural societies land is a major measure of wealth, a critical input in agricultural production, and a key variable for assessing agricultural performance and productivity. In the absence of cadastral information to refer to, measures of land plots have historically been taken with one of two approaches: traversing (very precise, but cumbersome), and farmerss self-report (cheap, but marred by large, systematic measurement error). Recently, the advent of cheap handheld GPS devices has held promise of balancing cost and precision concerns, and is increasingly being adopted by survey practitioners. There are, however, concerns about how GPS measures may perform on certain types of plots, or under given measurement conditions, and we are not aware of any large, experimental validation exercise that has formally assessed the performance of competing methods under real survey conditions.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2015
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