The poorest 20% of households in an African setting thus command a substantially different set of material entitlements than their Latin American bottom-quintile counterparts. But in addition to relative poverty (Table 2), we may also be interested in measures for the absolute poorest, looking at the 27% of households living below the commonly used poverty line of 1.25 US$/aeu/day (Table 5). This puts more spotlight on a low-income region like Sub-Saharan Africa where 43% of households fall under this poverty line, while in Latin America only 2% do. Of the 2,169 households falling under this absolute poverty line, 88% are from Sub-Saharan Africa. The results for environmental dependence are similar to those for the lowest quintile groups: 29% for the absolutely poorest versus 30% for the lowest quintile. The continental differences we observe between the two are much due to the very restricted sample of households under the US$1.25 limit outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. This also suggests that the structural differences between regions are probably more important in explaining income composition than is the level of total household income.

**Table 5: Household incomes below the US$1.25/person/day poverty line in PEN sites. PPP converted 2005 US$ adult equivalent units (aeu)**

||**Latin America**<br>**& Caribbean**|**South**<br>**Asia**|**East**<br>**Asia &**<br>**Pacific**|**Sub-**<br>**Saharan**<br>**Africa**|**PEN**<br>**total**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Total income [US$ pc/year]|334|353|278|272|276|
|Total cash income [US$ pc/year]|225|196|163|129|135|
|Cash share in total income [%]|67|56|59|48|49|
|Crop income [US$ pc/year]|95|74|81|92|90|
|Crop cash income [US$ pc/year]|57|16|20|25|25|
|Share crop income in total income [%]|28|21|29|34|33|
|Cash share in crop income [%]|60|22|24|28|28|
|Livestock income [US$ pc/year]|56|19|31|31|31|
|Livestock cash income [US$ pc/year]|40|10|19|18|18|
|Share livestock income in total income [%]|17|5|11|12|11|
|Cash share in livestock income [%]|71|53|61|56|57|
|Forest income [US$ pc/year]|26|90|41|50|51|
|Forest cash income [US$ pc/year]|5|10|18|15|15|
|Share forest income in total income [%]|8|25|15|18|18|
|Cash share in forest income [%]|21|11|44|31|30|
|Non-forestenvironmental income [US$ pc/year]|37|7|24|31|30|
|Non-forest environmental cash income [US$ pc/year]|3|0|6|5|5|
|Sharenon-forestenvironmental income in total income|11|2|9|11|11|
|[%]||||||
|Cash share innon-forestenvironmental income [%]|9|0|24|15|15|
|Wage income [US$ pc/year]|42|122|54|30|35|
|Share wage income in total income [%]|13|35|19|11|13|
|Household size|9|6|6|7|7|
|Number of households|23|75|171|1900|2169|

In Table 6, we look at the share of the population that falls below the poverty line, if we hypothetically subtracted subsistence income, forest income, or total environmental (forest plus non-forest) income, respectively, from total household income. This gives us an indication for what overall impact these sector incomes have on welfare and equity goals. As mentioned, just over one fourth of the PEN sample households fall below the poverty line, but if only cash income was included to calculate the poverty line, as much as half of the sample population would fail to climb above the poverty line. This strong effect can be explained by the fact that the poor have very high shares of subsistence incomes, especially in South 19