the household response to persistent natural disasters evidence from bangladesh we examine the short run economic impacts of recurrent flooding on bangladeshi households surveyed in 2000 2005 and 2010 in 2010 household income and expenditure survey hies households answered a set of questions on whether they were affected by flood and its likely impacts we identify two treatment affected groups by using the self reported data and historical rainfall data based flood risk index we estimate a difference indifference did model to quantify the impacts on income expenditure asset and labour market outcomes and further extend our analysis to different income and expenditure brackets overall we find robust evidence of negative impacts on agricultural income and expenditure intriguingly the extreme poor i e the bottom 15th quintile experience significant positive impacts on agricultural income in the self reported treatment case

poverty comparisons over time and across countries in africa abstract we use demographic and health surveys dhs to compare poverty at two or more points in time within and between african countries our welfare measure is an index resulting from a factor analysis of various household characteristics durables and household heads education an advantage of this measure is that for intertemporal and intraregional comparisons we need not rely on suspect price deflators and currency conversion factors the wide availability and similarity of questionnaires of the dhs facilitate comparisons over both time and countries our results generally show declines in poverty during the previous decade largely due to improvements in rural areas

the impact and targeting of social infrastructure investments lessons from the nicaraguan social fund this brief summarizes the impact and targeting of social infrastructure investments lessons from the nicaraguan social fund the fund was created in 1990 the benefit incidence and impact of projects financed by the nicaraguan emergency social investment fund are investigated using a sample of beneficiaries a national household survey and two distinct comparison groups the first group is constructed on the basis of geographic proximity between similar facilities and their corresponding communities the second is drawn from the national living standards measurement study survey sample using propensity score matching techniques the analysis finds that the social fund investments in latrines schools and health posts are targeted to poor communities and households whereas those in sewerage are targeted to the better off investments in water systems are poverty neutral education investments have a positive significant impact on school outcomes regardless of the comparison group the analysis finds that use of health investments is less clear using one comparison group the analysis finds that use of health clinics increased as a result of the investments using both it finds higher use of clinics for children under age six with diarrhea with neither comparison group does it find improvements in health outcomes social fund investments in water and sanitation improve access to services but have no effect on health outcomes

a real options approach to bankruptcy costs evidence from failed commercial banks during the 1990s literature identifies three main aspects of liquidation costs firm size asset specificity and industry concentration this paper unifies the theory behind these aspects of bankruptcy costs by treating them as components of a broader option valuation problem faced by the liquidating trustee testing the hypothesized asset price relationships on fdic failed bank liquidation data yields the appropriate results furthermore it appears that liquidation time alone can be used as an effective second order proxy for asset value growth where market value estimates are unavailable

an analysis of childhood malnutrition in rural india role of gender income and other household characteristics there are controversies regarding the role of individual and household characteristics in childhood nutritional status measured by anthropometric indicators using a nutrition index based on weight for age of children in rural india the paper re examines this issue ordered probit estimates of nutritional status suggest female literacy improves the nutritional status of boys at the cost of girls while higher per capita current income improves that of both boys and girls though the impact is higher for boys however effect of income is not robust when we use instruments of longer run income but more income and literacy give more ways to discriminate between boys and girls

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

are some groups more vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks than others hypothesis tests based on panel data from peru abstract which socio economic groups are most vulnerable to welfare declines during a macroeconomic shock after clarifying the difference between poverty and vulnerability this paper presents an analytical framework and applies it to panel data from peru major findings are 1 households with better educated heads are less vulnerable 2 female headed households are no more vulnerable than male headed households 3 households with more children are more vulnerable 4 transfer networks that assist the poor in relatively stable periods do not protect them during a major shock unless they originate from outside peru and 5 peru s social security program is targeted neither to vulnerable nor to poor households but other transfer programs are better targeted

measuring poverty using qualitative perceptions of consumption adequacy we show that subjective poverty lines can be derived using simple qualitative assessments of perceived consumption adequacy based on a household survey we implement the method using survey data for jamaica and nepal respondents were asked whether their consumptions of food housing and clothing were adequate for their family s needs the implied poverty lines are robust to alternative methods of dealing with other components of expenditure the aggregate poverty rates accord quite closely with those based on independent objective poverty lines however there are notable differences in the geographic and demographic poverty profiles

video game demand in japan a household data analysis various economic studies of the video game industry have focused on intra industry details this article complements the approach by highlighting broader budget allocation by households using the total households data of the family income and expenditure survey this article estimates the demand model for video games estimation results show the effects of household income and demographic factors and prices of goods on the expenditure share of video games these results indicate the importance of explicitly considering a households budget allocation or at least including information on households

weakly relative poverty prevailing measures of relative poverty are unchanged when all incomes grow or contract by the same proportion this property stems from seemingly implausible assumptions about the disutility of relative deprivation and the cost of social inclusion the authors propose weakly relative lines that relax these assumptions on calibrating our measures to national poverty lines and survey data we find that half the population of the developing world in 2005 lived in poverty only half of whom were absolutely poor the total number of poor rose over 1981 to 2005 despite falling numbers of absolutely poor with sustained economic growth the incidence of relative poverty became less responsive to further growth the number of relatively poor rose just as the numbers of absolutely poor fell

poverty food security nexus evidence from a survey of urban slum dwellers in kolkata we explore the poverty food security nexus using an experience based indicator of food security constructed using a cross section sample of slum households in kolkata within the framework of a simultaneous ordered probit model we find a poor household is also likely to be food insecure additionally education gender and household composition are major drivers of food insecurity among low income urban households with the policy implication that anti poverty policies should be successful in eliminating household food insecurity however they need to be complemented with human capital investment and gender empowerment to be most effective

measuring chronic poverty without a panel abstract a new method of decomposing cross sectional poverty estimates into chronic and transient components is demonstrated using data from a recent household survey in papua new guinea this method is simpler than previously used panel methods because it does not require data on every household in every period the only requirement is that a subset of the surveyed households have a repeat observation made on their welfare indicator some time after the initial observation in the setting considered the chronic and transient components of headcount poverty are roughly equal while three quarters of the mean poverty gap is transient in the sense of being due to within year fluctuations in expenditures

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

small scale industry environmental regulation and poverty the case of brazil governments and international development agencies have intensified efforts to promote small scale enterprises as an engine of pro poor growth in brazil however small scale industries may also be responsible for the bulk of air pollution emissions although employees of polluting small scale industries in brazil are not disproportionately poor simulations suggest that stringent environmental regulation resulting in widespread closures of pollution intensive small scale industries would result in a non negligible increase in poverty among employees of these firms the results suggest that the enthusiasm for small scale enterprises needs to be tempered by awareness of the potential environmental costs imposed by this sector

assessing the welfare impacts of public spending an important objective of public spending is to raise household living standards particularly for the poor but how can final impacts on this objective best be assessed evaluating a policy s impact requires assessing how different things would have been in its absence but the counterfactual of no intervention is tricky to quantify the author surveys the methods most often used to assess the welfare effects of public spending limitations of current practices are studied and implications for future best practices are drawn the methods used to assess welfare impacts broadly fall into two groups benefit incidence studies and behavioral approaches benefit incidence studies ignore behavioral responses and second round effects using the provision cost as a proxy for benefits received behavioral approaches present quite different drawbacks in attempting to represent individual benefits correctly a number of recent studies usefully combine both approaches it is still uncertain whether behaviorally consistent methods actually point to fundamentally different policy recommendations what can be concluded is that we need to diversify and compare results from our evaluation methods and broaden our definition of well being to see how various facets of living standard are affected by public spending

equivalence scale relativities and the extent of inequality and poverty most inequality and poverty theory analyzes equivalent income distributions for homogeneous populations incomes are assumed to be deflated by an equivalence scale that accounts for differences in needs between households yet in practice there is no consensus about what the appropriate equivalence scale is the authors analyze how the choice of equivalence scale affects inequality and poverty measures and show that there is a systematic relationship between equivalence scale generosity and the extent of inequality and poverty they consider most of the measures in common use and provide some empirical illustrations copyright 1992 by royal economic society

non linearities and equivalence scales this paper focuses on the estimation and testing of equivalence scales in the context of a demand system with nonline ar logarithmic expenditure effects in its budget share equations the authors show that such nonlinearity enables one to identify the scal es without demographic separability restrictions on preferences and to avoid false rejection of the hypothesis that the scales are independ ent of the base utility level the empirical analysis is based on micro data drawn from the u k family expenditure survey copyright 1993 by royal economic society

on testing the scale sensitivity of poverty measures past tests of the sensitivity of aggregate poverty measures to changes in equivalence scales can be very sensitive to the arbitrary choice of the pivotal reference demographics it is recommended that future tests should use demographics typical of people living near the poverty line as their reference

gender poverty and deprivation evidence from the republic of guinea the article examines the relationship between gender and consumption poverty and between gender and deprivation in the republic of guinea national household survey data reveal that women are not more likely than men to be consumption poor or to suffer greater consumption poverty participatory poverty assessment data from the village of kamatiguia reveal that women are worse off than men when deprivation includes inter alia excessive work load and reduced decision making authority when consumption poverty poorly correlates with other dimensions of deprivation it should not be the sole guide for equity based policy intervention

immigrant earnings age at immigration matters a correlation between age at immigration and earnings is observed in canadian census data the evidence supports three underlying sources of the effect first work expe rience in the source country yields virtually no return in the host country second the return to education varies with age at immigration and finally an acculturation effect is observed for immigrants who are visible minorities or whose mother tongue is not english further it is found that educational attainment and relatedly earnings vary systematically across age at immigration with those arriving around age 15 to 18 obtaining fewer years of education

the developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty a new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world we find that 25 of the population lived in poverty in 2005 as judged by what poverty typically means in the world s poorest countries this is higher than past estimates substantial overall progress is still indicated the corresponding poverty rate was 52 in 1981 but progress was very uneven across regions the trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology though precise counts are more sensitive

targeting the poor in mexico an evaluation of the selection of households into progresa abstract in this paper we conduct an evaluation of the targeting method used by health education and nutrition program progresa of mexico to identify beneficiary households we address two key questions a how well does progresa s targeting perform and b how does the program perform in terms of its impact on poverty alleviation relative to other feasible methods and transfer schemes the first question is accomplished by comparing progresa s method to an alternative selection method based on household consumption which is our preferred measure of welfare we employ the concepts of undercoverage and leakage and find that progresa selection method is more effective in identifying the extremely poor localities or households but less so when it comes to distinguishing among localities or households in the middle of the scale to address the second question we compare the potential impact of progresa on poverty alleviation against uniform transfers that involve no targeting at all targeting based on consumption and geographic targeting i e targeting at the locality level rather than at the household level we find that progresa s method of targeting households outperforms uniform coverage and targeting at the locality level in terms of reducing the poverty gap and severity of poverty indices even after taking into account the economic costs of targeting but the closeness of progresa s performance to what could be achieved by geographic targeting alone raises some serious questions about the costs and benefits associated with the practice of household targeting within poor localities

are women overrepresented among the poor an analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries abstract this paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in 10 developing countries it compares poverty measures for males and females and for male and female headed households and investigates the sensitivity of these measures to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units and different definitions of the poverty line while poverty measures are higher for female headed households and for females the differences are significant in only a fifth to a third of the datasets the contribution of female headed households to aggregate poverty is less than that of females due to the low population share of the former stochastic dominance analysis reveals that differences between male and female headed households and between males and females are often insignificant except for ghana and bangladesh where females are consistently worse off these results suggest that cultural and institutional factors may be responsible for higher poverty among women in these countries our results point to the need to analyze determinants of household income and consumption using multivariate methods and to give greater attention to the processes underlying female headship

are the welfare losses from imperfect targeting important we quantify and compare the size of the welfare losses arising from the use of alternative imperfect welfare indicators as substitutes for the conventionally preferred consumption indicator we find that the size of the welfare losses associated with different indicators varies considerably an asset based index and the share of food as targeting indicators were found to have the highest welfare losses relative to all other targeting indicators examined our preferred welfare index implies that the losses from the two best targeting indicators i e reported expenditures and reported income are statistically significant but very low less than 5

accounting for selectivity and duration dependent heterogeneity when estimating the impact of emigration on incomes and poverty in sending areas the impacts of international emigration and remittances on incomes and poverty in sending areas are increasingly studied with household survey data but comparing households with and without emigrants is complicated by a triple selectivity problem first households self select into emigration second in some emigrant households everyone moves while others leave members behind and third some emigrants choose to return to the origin country allowing for duration dependent heterogeneity introduces a fourth form of selectivity one must now worry not just about whether households migrate but also when they do so this paper clearly sets out these selectivity issues and their implications for existing migration studies and then addresses them by using survey data designed specifically to take advantage of a randomized lottery that determines which applicants to the over subscribed samoan quota may immigrate to new zealand the analysis compares incomes and poverty rates among left behind members in households in samoa that sent samoan quota emigrants with those for members of similar households that were unsuccessful in the lottery policy rules control who can accompany the principal migrant providing an instrument to address the second selectivity problem while differences among migrants in which year their ballot was selected allow for estimation of duration effects the authors find that migration reduced poverty among former household members but they also find suggestive evidence that this effect may be short lived as both remittances and agricultural income are negatively related to the duration that the migrant has been abroad

fertility and the household s economic status a natural experiment using indian micro data abstract we model fertility as endogenous to the family s economic status because poor households choose to have large families in the absence of adequate social insurance because of a strong son preference in india having two girls first can proxy an exogenous increase in fertility and is therefore a good instrument for fertility in determining poverty of rural households the 1993 1994 indian quinquennial survey data shows that even though poverty rates are comparable 74 per cent of two girl families have a third child compared to 63 per cent of other families fertility significantly positively affects poverty when treated as exogenous but vanishes once endogenised these results are robust to omitting states with skewed sex ratios and to proxying economic status by expenditures

poverty reduction without economic growth explaining brazil s poverty dynamics 1985 2004 brazil s slow pace of poverty reduction over the last two decades reflects both low growth and a low growth elasticity of poverty reduction using gdp data disaggregated by state and sector for a twenty year period this paper finds considerable variation in the poverty reducing effectiveness of growth across sectors across space and over time growth in the services sector was substantially more poverty reducing than was growth in either agriculture or industry growth in industry had very different effects on poverty across different states and its impact varied with initial conditions related to human development and worker empowerment the determinants of poverty reduction changed around 1994 positive growth rates and a greater absolute elasticity with respect to agricultural growth contributed to faster poverty reduction but because there was so little of it economic growth played a relatively small role in accounting for brazil s poverty reduction between 1985 and 2004 the taming of hyperinflation in 1994 and substantial expansions in social security and social assistance transfers beginning in 1988 accounted for a larger share of the overall reduction in poverty

widowhood and poverty in rural india some inferences from household survey data abstract this paper examines the relationship between widowhood and poverty in rural india based on national sample survey data on consumer expenditure in terms of standard poverty indices based on household per capita expenditure there is no evidence of widows being disproportionately concentrated in poor households or of female headed households being poorer than male headed households these findings also apply in terms of adult equivalent consumption for any reasonable choice of equivalence scales poverty indices for different household types however are quite sensitive to the level of economies of scale even relatively small economies of scale imply that the incidence of poverty among single widows widows living with unmarried children and female household heads all of whom tend to live in relatively small households is higher than in the population as a whole

economies of scale household size and the demand for food household scale economies are plausibly attributed to shared household public goods that make larger households better off at the same level of per capita resources larger households should therefore have higher per capita consumption of private goods such as food provided that they do not substitute too much toward the effectively cheaper public goods the evidence shows exactly the opposite data from rich and poor countries indicate that at constant per capita total expenditure the per capita demand for food decreases with household size and that it does so most in the poorest countries where substitution should be the least

poverty and survival a recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival but equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant using state level panel data for india we contribute the first estimates of the impact of changes in poverty on infant survival we identify a significant within state relationship which persists conditional upon state income indicating the size of survival gains from redistribution in favour of households below the poverty line the poverty elasticity declines over time after 1981 it is invariant to controlling for income inequality but diminished upon controlling for education fertility and state health expenditure and eliminated once we introduce controls for omitted trends

the power of the vegetable patch how home grown food helps large rural households achieve economies of scale escape poverty this paper explores how the household s capacity to grow food impacts their ability to achieve economies of scale in food consumption and how this impacts the geographic distribution of poverty across rural and urban areas an accurate understanding of consumption economies of scale is vital for comparing poverty levels across households of varying size using sri lankan data on home grown food consumption we empirically confirm that such economies of scale exist and that large households tend to consume relatively more home grown food than smaller households the magnitude of these scale economies are found to be larger than those in market purchased food but smaller than those found in housing expenditure consuming more home grown food is also found to be positively correlated with per capita calories consumed taking these effects into account in poverty estimates leads to a 15 per cent decline in the number of household who fall below the poverty line in rural regions

how robust is a poverty profile comparison of poverty such as when poverty is greatest typically matter far more for policy choices than do aggregate measures of poverty such as how many people are deemed poor the authors examine alternative methods for constructing poverty profiles focusing on their internal consistency and appropriateness for guiding policy none is perfect but some methods appear to be preferable to others when the aim is to inform policies for fighting absolute consumption poverty a case study on indonesia reveals that the country s regional and sectoral poverty profile is highly sensitive to some aspects of measurement but quite robust to others

smallholder land access in post war northern mozambique summary this paper analyzes the inequality and determinants of flexibility in smallholder land access in post war northern mozambique this paper demonstrates that high land endowments in aggregate do not imply equal access to cultivated or fallow land at the household level even if land access has some flexibility across time a formal test establishes the low extent of flexibility in land access at the household level in the study site the econometric analysis further reveals that some groups of households such as female headed households and those with low asset endowments or weak social institutions suffer from significant rigidities in land access

are female headed households more food insecure evidence from bangladesh summary this paper uses household and village level survey data to investigate the food security of male and female headed households in bangladesh with particular attention to indigenous ethnic groups and finds no significant differences in the food security between these two types of households the absence of social and cultural restrictions among the indigenous groups permitting their females greater freedom to participate in the labor force coupled with informal redistributive mechanism is attributed to their less food insecurity this result indicates that noneconomic institutions can significantly impact economic outcomes such as food security

traditional wealth modern goods and demographic behavior in rural senegal summary the study investigates the relationships of demographic indicators fertility mortality marriage education with modern and traditional wealth in rural senegal data were based on rural households interviewed in the 2011 dhs survey an absolute wealth index was computed from a list of 15 modern goods a traditional wealth index was computed from data on land and livestock per capita modern wealth was always associated with modern demographic behavior lower fertility lower mortality higher age at marriage higher level of education whereas traditional wealth was not associated with fertility and mortality and was negatively associated with marriage and education

domestic technology consumption economies of scale and poverty evidence from sri lanka while it is well known that new technologies enhance consumer welfare the manner in which these technologies impact the ability to realize economies of scale in consumption is not well understood we use sri lankan household data to examine how the adoption of new technologies by households positively impacts their ability to achieve household economies of scale this suggests that new technologies not only deliver a greater variety of consumption goods to consumers but they may also play an important role in enabling large households to escape poverty by lowering the per capita costs of maintaining a given standard of living given the importance of consumption economies of scale in the measurement of poverty this study provides some insights on the extent to which the number of poor households changes when food consumption scale economies due to technology adoption in the domestic sphere are incorporated

poverty in america 1970 1990 who did gain ground an application of stochastic dominance criteria employing simultaneous inequality tests in a partial panel atkinson 1987 proposed stochastic dominance criteria for analysing poverty which under certain conditions establish orderings of states for any poverty line and any poverty measure within given class refocusing debate on the nature of the income distribution of the poor employing new empirical techniques these criteria are implemented for the united states from 1970 to 1990 using the panel study of income dynamics results highlight the pivotal role of family size scale economies in consumption indicate different experiences for white versus non white groups and suggest that optimism over the progress of the poor is not warranted copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

testing the barten model of economies of scale in household consumption toward resolving a paradox of deaton and paxson households enhance the welfare of constituents by sharing shelter and appliances and economizing in services such as maintenance child care and food preparation resources so conserved can be applied to more personal goods such as food clothing or beauty care economizing by households is an important factor to consider when measuring poverty and inequality in 1895 ernst engel observed that the share of food consumption in total consumption can be used to measure economic welfare across households of different sizes and incomes larger or richer households spend a smaller share of their total expenditure on food although more elaborate methods have been developed see e g a survey by browning 1992 the use of food share or the budget share of other bundles of necessities as a proxy for welfare remains a viable method for measuring poverty and studying equivalence scales see e g deaton and muellbauer 1986 lanjouw and ravallion 1995 engel s method is popular for its simplicity it has only one demand equation to be estimated with the food share of total expenditure as a dependent variable a single cross sectional survey usually provides sufficient data for the analysis and no information on prices is required

measurement error in recall surveys and the relationship between household size and food demand variation in household survey design and implementation is used to obtain evidence of nonrandom measurement error in recall surveys of household expenditure these surveys which are used especially in developing countries appear to have measurement errors in food expenditures and in food budget shares that are correlated with household size these correlated errors may be part of the explanation for a puzzling pattern of falling food demand with rising household size in poorer countries

household equivalence scales theory versus policy researchers agree that household equivalence scales are intended to measure the variation in income needed to bring households of different composition to the same welfare level researchers do not agree however about how the term household welfare is to be defined this article traces the historical and philosophical development of three distinct definitions when the conceptual bases of several popular methods for the estimation of equivalence scales are explored it becomes clear that advances in theoretical rigor have not always worked to bring the literature closer to answering questions of policy concern

an empirical investigation into measurement and determinants of food security abstractwe examine the association between calorie based indicators and experiential indicators of food security using data from slum households of kolkata surveyed in 2010 2011 experiential indicator is constructed following the united states household food security survey module calorie based indicator is constructed using household specific calorie norms modelling techniques take account of potential endogeneity in the relationship the two indicators are aligned in the same direction implying more accurate targeting however there is a lack of one to one correspondence between the two measures and the drivers of calorie deprivation and food insecurity also differ suggesting a one size fits all policy cannot address both concerns simultaneously

issues in measuring and modeling poverty economists have relied heavily on household incomes or expenditures normalized for differences in household specific prices and demographics in their research and policy advice related to poverty and inequality recognizing the conceptual and empirical problems that confound such measures does not mean that they should be ignored instead it indicates the need for supplementary measures to capture the missing items implementing a genuinely multidimensional approach will often make the welfare rankings of social states more difficult but that fact points to the nonrobustness of low dimensional rankings this may have its own policy ramifications with the possibility of correspondence between policy instruments and welfare objectives the model types used to understand the poverty and inequity determination processes will be affected not only will there be more dependent variables to consider but variables will have potentially complex relationships these relationships will often be hard to empirically disentangle despite richer integrated and longitudinal data sets such data open rich and relevant agenda for research into the dynamics of poverty along multiple dimensions a simultaneous attack on these issues from all three fronts measurement modeling and data offers hope of establishing a credible empirical foundation for public action in fighting poverty

targeting performance under self selection and administrative targeting methods abstract we evaluate the contributions of self selection and administrative targeting to program targeting performance using unique household survey data collected for the evaluation of a mexican social program that has acted as a regional prototype both forms of targeting improve targeting performance but administrative selection based on proxy means testing plays a crucial role in reducing total program coverage to meet a budget constraint while maintaining high coverage among the lowest income groups its importance is reinforced when existing knowledge barriers to participation are addressed reflecting the high application rates among higher income groups conditional on knowledge differentiating transfers based on household demographics also substantially improves targeting performance reflecting the linking of transfers to the number of children although expansion of the program to reduce the remaining undercoverage is likely to come at the expense of targeting performance this trade off can

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

vulnerability and chronic poverty in rural sichuan abstract chinese anti poverty policy stresses the long term structural nature of rural poverty this paper shows that poverty in rural sichuan during 1991 95 was both dynamic and persistent a new measure of chronic poverty is defined as a high vulnerability to being poor and compared with traditional interpretations of chronic poverty as low mean consumption households are highly vulnerable to falling into poverty even when their average consumption is some distance above the poverty line the determinants of low mean consumption and high vulnerability appear however to be similar suggesting that policies to increase mean consumption will also reduce vulnerability

measuring poverty and differences in family composition the equivalence scales used to adjust for differences in family composition when measuring poverty exhibit considerable variation this paper suggests an alternative approach that allows for differences in social judgements regarding the treatment of different types of family and examines the relation with the choice of poverty measure the resulting dominance criteria cannot provide a complete ranking but allow the extent of disagreement to be identified their application is illustrated by the example of changes in child benefits copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

an intertemporal analysis of expenditure elasticities under three expenditure specifications for sri lanka household income has been identified as one of the major determinants of demand for household goods in addition other household characteristics such as household size and composition are also fo

food stamp benefits and child poverty in 2000 8 8 million children lived in households participating in the food stamp program making this assistance program a crucial component of the social safety net despite its importance little research has examined food stamps effect on children s overall well being using the current population survey from 1989 to 2001 we consider the impact of food stamps on three measures of poverty the headcount the poverty gap and the squared poverty gap we find that in comparison to the headcount measure food stamp benefits lead to large reductions in the poverty gap and squared poverty gap measures

household economies of scale in consumption theory and evidence household economies of scale arising from the existence of househo ld public goods increasing returns in household production and or bulk discounts are incorporated into a utility theoretic model of household demands individuals are assumed to be identical and symmetrically treated within households economies of scale parameters for five goods are estimated using the quadratic expenditu re system and data from the u s consumer expenditure survey on expenditures by all adult households results suggest the existence o f significant economies of scale in the consumption of all of the included goods with economies being especially pronounced in the consumption of shelter copyright 1988 by the econometric society

women headed households and household welfare an empirical deconstruction for uganda abstract analysis of the first nationally representative household survey of uganda shows that women headed households are not poorer when assessed by consumption or income nor do they appear consistently disadvantaged on social indicators some subgroups of women headed households do have lower economic welfare including those headed by widows and those in urban areas gender inequalities in educational attainment appears to be the major source of what economic disadvantage such women headed households do face high remittances receipts play a key role in maintaining economic parity between women and men headed households

are the poor less well insured evidence on vulnerability to income risk in rural china the authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural china they estimate the risk insurance models by generalized method of moments treating income and household size as endogenous insurance exists for all wealth groups although the hypothesis of perfect insurance is universally rejected those in the poorest wealth decile are the least well insured with 40 percent of an income shock being passed on to current consumption by contrast consumption by the richest third of households is protected from almost 90 percent of an income shock the extent of insurance in a given wealth stratum varies little between poor and nonpoor areas

global extreme poverty rates for children adults and the elderly chen and ravallion s estimates of global extreme poverty rates are well known this note by considering how these rates vary by age group reaches two important and policy relevant conclusions and emphasizes a central avenue for future research the first is that child extreme poverty rates are 50 higher than adult ones and almost twice those of the elderly this result depends on assuming that all individuals in a household have the same resource needs and no economies of scale exist as in the world bank standard approach conversely if conservative estimates of economies of scale and individual discount factors are adopted global extreme poverty rates and the child adult gap are much smaller than the chen and ravallion estimates these findings highlight the policy importance of research efforts towards understanding how needs vary within a household and with its size

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

data watch the world bank s living standards measurement study household surveys since 1985 the world bank has been collecting household survey data in developing countries that provide a rich source of information for assessing household welfare understanding household behavior and evaluating the impact of government policies this article describes these household surveys known as living standards measurement study lsms surveys and explains how to obtain their data lsms surveys have been implemented in over twenty developing countries and have been used to analyze poverty labor markets health and education pricing policies determinants of school performance savings and consumption smoothing health and nutrition policies and gender and fertility issues

returns to education in india summary in india both men and women with more education live in households with greater consumption per capita yet aggregating across age cohorts and states an extra year of education brings male cohorts only 4 more consumption and provides no additional consumption for female cohorts this result is robust to 1 accounting for survey measurement error 2 different measures of household consumption and composition 3 allowing returns to differ by state and school quality and 4 age misreporting the only area with substantial returns is entering into regular wage work which still employs only a small fraction of the population

equity and policy effectiveness with imperfect targeting abstract we propose a general approach that jointly integrates horizontal and vertical equity criteria in the assessment of poverty alleviation programs with the strength of each criterion being captured through its own inequity aversion parameter this contrasts with the assessment of poverty alleviation programs done with simple under coverage and leakage ratios or with other methods that do not take into account the heterogeneity of the poor and that do not address directly the social benefits of achieving normative criteria our methodology is illustrated using tunisian data and two alternative poverty alleviation policies we find inter alia that the social ranking of commodity and socio demographic targeting in tunisia depends on the policymaker s comparative preference for vertical and horizontal equity

literacy and intrahousehold externalities abstract the size of the intrahousehold externality created when a literate household member provides literacy services to illiterate members is estimated in this paper using a model of children s height for age in papua new guinea this externality appears to be large these results support the use of a new measure of literacy developed by basu and foster 1998 to take account of the gains when illiterates live in households where at least one person is literate regional rankings change when the new measure of literacy is used suggesting that policies guided by the usual measure of adult literacy may overlook an important pathway for human development

consumption and welfare in ghana in the 1990s abstract in this paper two issues which have been the subject of much multidisciplinary research are investigated the first is whether consumption expenditure can be treated as a measure of welfare the second is whether larger households can be viewed as richer than smaller ones these issues are investigated drawing on data for ghana covering the 1990s it is argued that while household consumption can act as an opportunity measure of welfare the use of averages can mislead the problems in assessing how household size affects the measurement of welfare are discussed in the context of ghana s experience of poverty reduction

poverty in egypt modeling and policy simulations abstract poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society but they are limited by the bivariate nature of their informational content using the 1997 egypt integrated household survey eihs this article estimates models of household consumption in the first stage and then predicts poverty rates corresponding to changes in potential policy variables the key results of the study point to the important instrumental role of education parental background land redistribution and access to health facilities in alleviating poverty in egypt

new global estimates of child poverty and their sensitivity to alternative equivalence scales this paper uses micro data from household surveys from 89 countries to estimate the rate of extreme poverty among children in the developing world 19 5 of children are estimated to live on less than 1 90 per day as opposed to 9 2 of adults poverty rates for children remain above 17 and are greater than adult poverty rates for all reasonable two parameter equivalence scales

the robustness of poverty profiles reconsidered poverty measures and profiles are used increasingly to guide antipoverty policies in low income countries an essential element in these analyses is the specification of a poverty line however there are many different methods for setting poverty lines and different methods can yield strikingly different results with correspondingly different policy implications using recent household survey data from mozambique this paper explores the differences that occur using the most common poverty line methodologies the food energy intake fei and the cost of basic needs cbn methods over different levels of geographic specificity we find that regional and provincial rankings of foster greer and thorbecke poverty indices are not robust to the method of poverty line determination but that the characteristics of the poor are reasonably similar under all methods the fei poverty lines often yield counterintuitive results whereas the family of cbn poverty lines was more robust food consumption patterns of the poor show a high degree of substitution among basic staples from one region to another which is consistent with observed differences in relative food prices indicating that cbn poverty lines that allow for regional variation in the food consumption bundle may be most appropriate in these settings

tax incidence in madagascar an analysis using household data this article discusses tax incidence in madagascar and asks who pays the taxes that finance government spending its main concern is to identify the progressivity of different taxes levied in madagascar based on the consumption and income patterns found in the 1994 enquete permanente aupres des menages a nationally representative survey the results suggest that most taxes are progressive meaning that wealthy households pay proportionately more of these taxes relative to their expenditures than do poor households two notable exceptions are taxes on kerosene and export duties on vanilla both of which are regressive these results are consistent with those of a study of ghana the only other comparable research on tax incidence in africa that study found taxes on kerosene and cocoa exports to be the most regressive taxes in ghana making firm policy recommendations for tax reform would require an analysis of the economic efficiency and administrative efficacy of different taxes to complement this article s work on their equity implications nevertheless the results suggest that the movement away from trade taxes especially export duties and toward broadly based value added or income taxes would be more equitable and more economically efficient the only legitimate impediment to such reforms in madagascar is administrative that is the government s ability to collect different taxes effectively although administrative efficiency may be a problem for value added or income taxes taxes on petroleum products except kerosene are highly progressive and provide a good tax handle