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	Household Livelihood Survey	Asset Index Construction
Field	Development Studies	Development Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	2001
Originator	Frank Ellis; CIFOR Poverty Environment Network	Deon Filmer & Lant Pritchett
Type	Multi-source income and assets household survey	Composite socioeconomic-status proxy index
Seminal source	Ellis, F. (2000). Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Developing Countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780198296966	Filmer, D., & Pritchett, L. H. (2001). Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data—or Tears: An Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India. Demography, 38(1), 115-132.
Aliases	Livelihood survey, Household income survey, Rural livelihoods survey, Income and assets survey	Wealth Index, Asset Index, PCA Wealth Index, Socioeconomic Status Index
Related	4	4
Summary	A household livelihood survey is an instrument designed to capture the full portfolio of activities, income sources, assets, and expenditures through which a household secures its living. Rooted in the rural-livelihoods literature associated with Frank Ellis and in global comparative income studies such as the CIFOR Poverty Environment Network, it measures welfare and resilience by mapping the diversity of a household's economic activities — farming, wage labour, self-employment, environmental harvesting, transfers, and remittances — rather than reducing the household to a single income or consumption figure.	Asset index construction builds a proxy for household wealth or socioeconomic status from observable possessions — durable goods, housing quality, and access to utilities — when reliable income or consumption data are unavailable. The dominant approach, popularized by Deon Filmer and Lant Pritchett in 2001, applies principal component analysis (PCA) to a set of asset variables and uses the first principal component as a set of weights, producing a single wealth score for each household. The method underlies the wealth quintiles reported in Demographic and Health Surveys and many other household surveys across low- and middle-income countries.