more extreme forms of deprivation where households reduce their intake of staple foods. Finally, we consider other markers of welfare, including subjective measures of poverty.

# 4.1. Overall monetary consumption and poverty

We begin by estimating Equation 1 with the log of consumption – in 2011 PPP-adjusted USD – as the independent variable. As described above, Chad is excluded from this analysis due to the timing of the EHVCM waves. Mali is also excluded from any specifications involving monetary consumption due to limitations on the consumption data.<sup>21</sup> Pooling the data from Burkina Faso, Niger, and Senegal, monetary consumption is approximately 10.5 percent lower in the lean season according to the specification without controls, a difference which is statistically significant even at the 1 percent level (Table 1).<sup>22</sup> At the mean level of consumption across those three countries, this represents a difference of 0.37 USD 2011 PPP per person per day. This estimate only drops to 9.9 percent when a full set of controls are included and remains statistically significant. Therefore, seasonal swings in welfare appear to be sizeable in the EHCVM sample.

**Table 1. Difference in the log of total monetary consumption per capita between the lean season wave and non-lean season wave**

||Burkin|a Faso|Ni|ger|Sen|egal|All except C|had and Mali|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||No<br>controls|Full<br>controls|No<br>controls|Full<br>controls|No<br>controls|Full<br>controls|No<br>controls|Full<br>controls|
|Lean season<br>wave|-0.1793***|-0.1397***|-0.0605*|-0.0671***|-0.0899**|-0.0888***|-0.1049***|-0.0988***|
||(0.0529)|(0.0268)|(0.0359)|(0.0217)|(0.0437)|(0.0184)|(0.0305)|(0.0135)|
|N|7017|6936|6020|5919|7153|7107|20190|19962|
|R-squared|0.0183|0.5474|0.0030|0.4726|0.0058|0.5607|0.0066|0.5858|

Note: * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01. Standard errors clustered at the ‘grappe’ level in parentheses. Dependent variable is the log of total monetary consumption per capita. Individual-level sampling weights applied. ‘Full controls’ specifications include controls for the gender, age, and education level of the household head, household size, the dependency ratio, household walls material, household roof material, household floor material, access to electricity, access to improved drinking water, and access to improved sanitation as well as region fixed effects. Source: EHCVM and World Bank estimates.

Moreover, monetary consumption appears to be lower in the lean season across the consumption distribution. Looking at the probability density functions for the log of consumption in the lean season and non-lean season in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Senegal demonstrates that it is only around the 90<sup>th</sup> percentile that the two distributions begin to converge (Figure 6). Thus, poorer households – including

> 21 Including the consumption data that are available for Mali would, if anything, strengthen the results. Estimating Equation 1 with the data for Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal, consumption was 11.5 percent lower in the lean season than in the non-lean season in the specification without controls and 10.2 percent lower in the specification with full household and location controls.

> 22 Here we are reading the coefficient in the log-linear regression directly as a percentage change. Exponentiating this coefficient does not dramatically alter the results. It should also be noted that these results differ slightly from those presented in the previous policy brief using the EHCVM data. There, the difference in means were calculated using a linear model rather than a log-linear model.

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