The objective of this paper is to determine if achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for a country has an impact on the geographical disparities, for some selected indicators, within the country. IPUMS-I data provide variables comparable between countries (while the sources traditionally used by the United Nations are not) and allow examining differences for lower levels of geography and between urban and rural settings. We measure indicators related to education, gender equality, and maternal health. For all of them, we will be primarily interested in disparities by gender across geographical units. Furthermore, we will track changes for these indicators for all censuses available since the 1990's round. Finally, we explore demographic factors related to higher disparities for these indicators.

This research aims to develop a reliable and robust measure for socioeconomic status at the household level using census data available from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series- International (IPUMS-I), the world's largest census database. First, we use principal component analysis to compute a wealth index based on housing characteristics and asset ownership, with separate measures for rural and urban areas. The validation strategies include comparing our proposed index with the widely used Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) wealth indices and then verifying the predictive power of our index on selected outcomes. Moreover, we attempt to identify general conditions necessary to produce a robust asset index based on census data. Preliminary results based on the wealth indices from four separate samples reveal estimates comparable to the DHS indices. Conditioned on the reliability of the results, this measure will be included in the IPUMS-I database for further research.