culminated in the United Nations Guidelines for Producing Statistics on Asset Ownership from a Gender Perspective (UNSD, 2019).<sup>6</sup> The guidelines, consistent with the previous work by Grown et al. (2005) and Doss et al. (2011), provide empirical evidence in support of (i) reducing the reliance on most knowledgeable household member(s) in collecting individual-disaggregated survey data on ownership of and rights to assets, (ii) expanding the practice of interviewing multiple adults per household (in fact interviewing either all adults or one randomly selected adult for collecting the required data for the SDG 5.a.1), and (iii) probing directly and solely regarding respondents’ personal ownership of and rights to assets, either exclusively or jointly with someone else. The implementation of these recommendations has been demonstrated to provide a more complete picture of ownership of and rights to assets within households, particularly among women; minimize distortionary proxy respondent effects and intra-household discrepancies in reporting; and reveal hidden assets (Kilic and Moylan, 2016).

**Box 1.  Methodological Experiment on Measuring Asset Ownership from a Gender Perspective (MEXA)**

MEXA is a randomized household survey experiment that was implemented by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics in 2014, in collaboration with the UN EDGE Initiative and the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS), providing a unique opportunity for more in-depth analysis of gender disparities in asset ownership, with a focus on land ownership.

The experiment targeted 140 enumeration areas (EAs) across Uganda, and randomly allocated four households in each EA to each of five treatments/arms that differed in terms of respondent selection. Regardless of the treatment, the respondent(s) were interviewed alone. The first four treatments/arms included interviewing (1) the self-identified most knowledgeable household member; (2) a randomly selected member of the principal couple; (3) the principal couple together; (4) all adult household members, simultaneously.

In Arms 1-4, the respondents reported on all assets owned, either exclusively or jointly, by members of the household. Arm 5 was identical to Arm 4, except that respondents reported only on assets they themselves owned, either exclusively or jointly. The asset types included: dwelling, agricultural land, livestock, agricultural equipment, other real estate, non-farm enterprises/enterprise assets, financial assets and liabilities, and valuables. Differentiation across legal, reported, and economic ownership and the bundle of rights (sell, rent out, use as collateral, bequeath, and make investments) at the asset level was key. Individuals associated with each of these constructs were uniquely identified.

Please consult Kilic and Moylan (2016) for more information on the design, implementation and analysis of MEXA.

However, surveying multiple household members comes with greater cost and additional measurement complexities. Disagreement may occur across spouses, and interpretations of

> 6 The guidelines can be accessed here: https://unstats.un.org/edge/publications/docs/Guidelines_final.pdf.

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