Emphasizes the importance of availability of household consumption and expenditure data and provides examples of the types of differences that are observed in consumption and expenditure household surveys, across countries and in countries over time, which show how relatively innocuous changes can have large effects on the measures of consumption, shared prosperity, and poverty. Questionnaire design, timing of the fieldwork, and cost of living differences can have significant effects on measured poverty and shared prosperity. Although the stock of household surveys has increased over the past three decades, the annual flow of surveys is still relatively low; while 129 countries are currently represented by more than 1,000 surveys, in a typical year, there are only about 20 to 40 new surveys available. A proposed path forward to increase efforts in data collection calls for exploiting new technologies, including computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) software platforms, cell phones, geocoding, and new imputation methods.