During 2006/07 the SEDLAC will be extended in the following directions:

1. Revising the statistics
A large-scale dataset like the SEDLAC implies a daily work of revising and controlling the construction of variables and statistics, identifying mistakes, and searching for more efficient ways of processing the data and presenting the statistics. It is not infrequent that while working with one survey we find a better way of defining a variable from the answers allowed by the questionnaire. In this case we revise all the surveys in that country to assess whether an improvement can be made in all Stata do files, and in turn in all the statistical tables. If deemed necessary, we replicate this process for all countries. In this way this daily work on the surveys allows a constant improvement of the database. Of course, we expect that this process converges: the number and relevance of the changes should be diminishing over time, but not necessarily disappear altogether.

2. Adding household surveys
The SEDLAC is intended to be an updated database of household surveys, so we try to rapidly obtain and process any new household survey available in the region.

3. Poverty profiles
We will include a poverty profile for each country in the database. A poverty profile characterizes the poor population in terms of demographic, education, labor, housing, and income variables.

4. Assets
Many surveys include information on assets (TV, refrigerator, computer, and so on), which are relevant to learn about people’s living conditions and wealth. We plan to include basic information on assets in the SEDLAC.

5. Health statistics
A section on health variables constructed from microdata of household surveys will be included. That section will have information on health insurance coverage, pregnancy and birth, vaccination, illness, visits to doctors, hospitalizations and medicines.