household questionnaires from a variety of sources to discern the best practices. To understand gendered patterns of asset ownership, it is important to know both the incidence of asset ownership (the proportion of men and women who own a particular asset) and the relative value of the assets owned by men and women. Both incidence and values provide measures of the degree of gender inequality in a given context. Incidence, as a measure of the likelihood of ownership, best captures gender roles and what is considered culturally appropriate for women to own in a given context. However, the relative value of assets owned by men and women is a stronger measure of gender disparities in opportunities and outcomes, and therefore perhaps a more telling indicator of women’s economic power in a given context.

# 4.1.  Collecting Asset Data at the Household Level

The LSMS have been developed and promoted by the World Bank worldwide. These multipurpose questionnaires generally include modules on income and expenditure, and often also include questions regarding asset ownership at the household level. Indeed, they have been used by researchers to estimate the distribution of wealth at the national level in many developing countries (Davies et al. 2006).

For the purposes of this overview, we reviewed some 72 LSMS and quasi-LSMS household questionnaires utilized in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe and Central Asia.<sup>19</sup> As Table 3 shows, most of these LSMS questionnaires collect data on the incidence of ownership of consumer durables (including vehicles), housing, land and livestock. Fewer collect data on the ownership of farm equipment, non-agricultural business assets, and savings.

Of the various asset categories, data on financial assets is the most incomplete. While 56 percent of the surveys in our sample collected information on savings, relatively few collect household data on ownership of financial instruments such as stocks and bonds. Most (88 percent) collect data on whether an individual in the household received pension income during the previous month or year, but the data on pension income does not tell us much about the incidence and value of pension wealth. For example, the different types and sources of pension income are rarely delineated, so it is difficult to differentiate pension income streams from contributory schemes and those from a government entitlement. In addition, while one may be able to calculate the incidence of pension income among those who have retired, no information is provided on those who are still working, contributing to a pension, and accumulating pension assets.

Similarly, the data on rent, interest, and/or dividends tells us about incidence only if a stream of income is currently generated from the relevant asset; such income data does not provide much insight into its value. And this data is not always in a form that is sufficiently disaggregated to allow the researcher to easily tie it to household ownership of a given asset.

Table 3 suggests some regional differences in the coverage of household asset data in the LSMS. The questionnaires examined for Latin America and the Caribbean, which represent just over half of our sample, tend to do a poorer job in soliciting data on household ownership of land, livestock and businesses assets than those utilized in other regions of the world.<sup>20</sup> 17