Poverty projection using a small area estimation method: Evidence from Vietnam

► A small area estimation method of Elbers et al. (2003) is widely used to estimate poverty measures at a disaggregated level. ► This paper proposes a variant of the small area estimation method to project a map of disaggregated poverty measures in the future. ► This method is applied to project a poverty map in rural Vietnam for the year 2008. ► The projection method produces quite encouraging results when applied using Vietnam's data.