|Economic household typology|All wom|en|Women|20‐34|
|---|---|---|---|---|
||Poor|Non‐|Poor|Non‐|
|||poor||poor|
|Male earner ‐ with children & earner dep (21.0%)|41.7%|28.1%|39.8%|28.2%|
|Head couple earner ‐ with children only (10.2%)|10.6%|15.0%|10.4%|14.4%|
|Multiple earners ‐ with children & earner dep (7.1%)|15.0%|12.2%|15.0%|13.3%|
|No earners ‐ with senior dep (6.7%)|0.9%|4.3%|0.2%|0.3%|
|Total (45%)|68.3%|59.5%|65.3%|56.2%|

Note: Numbers in parenthesis refer to the share of each typology in the total number of households; table shows the four typologies with the highest shares among total households. Sample of 89 countries for Demographic typology, and 71 countries for Economic Typology Source: WB Staff’s calculations based on GMD.

The previous sub‐sections examined the share of different types of households that are poor, classified both according to their demographic and economic composition. On the demographic side, in general households with children are more likely to be poor than similar households without children. However, of the households with children, the most common types of households ‐‐ those with children and an adult couple, with or without other adults present ‐‐ have a smaller share in poverty. On the economic side, households with both adult and child dependents are disproportionately poor, particularly those with no earners, a single female earner, or to a lesser extent, a single male earner. Among households without grown dependents, single female earner households are the poorest.

This final section considers the extent to which these results are robust when controlling for additional characteristics. For each type of classification, we consider three specifications. The first contains no controls and therefore reflects the unconditional relationship between household type and extreme poverty. These are equivalent to the unconditional results presented at the individual level. The second controls for a full set of country dummy variables, and therefore only considers within‐country variation in poverty and household type. The third specification adds four additional household characteristics as controls: the maximum educational attainment category, the average age of earners, and household size, and an urban/rural dummy. As can be seen in Figure 14 below, adding even country dummies significantly attenuates the differences in poverty between the different types of household that contain children. With the full set of controls, single female adults with children are the poorest, followed by households with children and multiple female or male adults. The differences in poverty rates between households with children and without remains, but is reduced, to about 2 to 3 percentage points (results shown in annex, Tables A7 and A8).

With respect to the economic classification (Figure 15), introducing controls also greatly reduces the penalty for household types with both adult and traditional dependents (children an elderly). Nonetheless, the penalty for these types of households remains larger than for others, except for households with one male earner and both earner dependents and traditional dependents. Controlling for other characteristics, 9.8 percent of households with a one female earner and traditional dependents, but no adult dependents, are poor. This is close to the 11 percent share for households with no earners and both adult and traditional dependents. This is still significantly larger than other households that are unlikely to be in poverty, such as those with one male earner and traditional dependents, or household couples that both work and support both traditional and earner dependents. Not surprisingly, the economic classification, to a greater extent than the demographic classification, remains an important determinant of household poverty status after controlling for selected household characteristics and country dummies.

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