Asset Index Construction

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.