by credit card) as well as goods and services obtained via nonmonetary means. The latter includes donations (presenting in-kind transfers), production for household self-consumption, and other sources such as withdrawal from business or trade where no money was involved.

The consumption aggregate is composed of the following components:

- 1) _Food consumption._ We include the value of food consumed from all possible sources, as measured in POF. This includes food acquired for consumption at home, which is collected in the household questionnaire of frequent acquisitions (POF 3). Food consumed at home can be acquired via monetary means, obtained through own production, or received in kind or via other means that do not involve monetary payment. The value of consumption of FAFH is collected in the individual-level expenditure questionnaire on nonhousehold goods and services (POF 4). Again, this component of food consumption might have been acquired via monetary as well as nonmonetary means. We aggregate the values of individual consumption of FAFH at the household level and include it in the consumption aggregate. Finally, POF also collects information on food consumption outside the home – in particular, meals consumed in settings like at school or on vacation. This information is collected outside of these two questionnaires, since it is collected in expenditure modules on education and vacation expenses, for instance. Following Deaton and Zaidi (2002), with the exception of school meals obtained via nonmonetary means, we include the value of this type of food consumption in the consumption aggregate.<sup>10</sup>

- 2) _Consumption of nonfood items._ For the value of nonfood consumption to be included in the consumption aggregate, we need to make a few choices in order to make the aggregate adequate for our purpose of analysis. POF collects information on a wide range of nonfood items, but several are typically not included in the construction of a consumption aggregate used for welfare analysis. Examples include taxes or “lumpy” acquisitions that are usually made at a low frequency (see Deaton and Zaidi, 2002). We exclude the following nonfood categories from the calculation of our consumption aggregate:

- _Health expenditures (monetary and nonmonetary), other than expenditures on insurances._ The general recommendation on health expenditures is to exclude these from the calculation of the welfare aggregate (see Deaton and Zaidi, 2002). This is because it is not clear whether and to which extent health care expenditures are welfare-enhancing. Empirically, this decision can be guided by the elasticities of health care expenditures to total expenditures, with high elasticities providing a case for inclusion (Deaton and Zaidi, 2002). We estimated elasticities of expenditures on pharmaceutical products and on health services with respect to total expenditures. These were relatively low, at 0.67 and 0.84, respectively, and for each we rejected the null hypothesis that the elasticities were equal to one : η =1 ). We include, however, expenditures on health insurance. This is in line with Oliveira et al. (2016) and justifiable, given that these can be seen as oo

- (HH

- welfare-enhancing.

- _Nonmonetary education consumption._ Although there are arguments to exclude education expenditures from the consumption aggregate, the general recommendation is to include them (Deaton and Zaidi, 2002). We follow this recommendation but excluded nonmonetary education

> 10 We did not include school meals if they were obtained via nonmonetary means, since these could be publicly provided and as such are difficult to value.

9