48 RENT CONTROL IN KUMASI, GHANA During their life, a man or woman in Asante traditionally has obligations to members of the lineage which are at least as great as his or her obligations to spouse and children. A house-owner cannot easily resist requests from lineage members for a room in his or her house. They have a right to a room, just as much as if they had already inherited it in common with other lineage members. In reciprocation, they would have obligations to their benefactor and an owner would increase in status by having them around. Indeed, the rent control legislation recognizes the importance of this system by allowing eviction of renters if a room is required for a family member. Thus, many family members live rent free either in .i living relative's house or in one inherited in common. In this report they are referred to as "family ',ousers"

# Income and Consumption

Data on income are very difficult to collect in Kumasi. Not only do people have formal earnings complicated by multiple allowances which can be anything up to five times as large as salaries, but also most households have income from informal activities, chiefly trading, in both cash and kind. As few households seem to pay their full liability for tax, especially on non-formal earnings, there is a great reluctance to tell the truth about income. Both the 1980 (Tipple, 1984a) and 1986 surveys found that incomes bore no relationship to consumption (in the 1986 survey, the median consumption to income ratio was 2 to 1). Thus, in the 1986 survey, data were gathered on household expenditure on food, transport, services (water, electricity, etc), rent or housing loan payments, and an "other" category. The aggregate of these is taken to be hodsehold monthly expenditure and acts as a proxy for income.

There are shortcomings in this approach, chiefly uncertainty about whether expenditure has been inflated and to what extent the "other" category has been accounted accurately; some non-sampling errors are unavoidable in social research collecting sensitive data on personal finance. However, the use of consumption has advantages as it is likely to represent permanent income more accurately than income data, and demand is more closely related to permanent than to short-term income (Malpezzi and Mayo, 1985).

The 1986 survey found median monthly consumption to be C12,500 ($140) per household and C3300 ($37) per capita. These can be compared roughly to estimates of consumption from National Income Accounts. The Bank's World Development Report reports that average per capita income was US$ 390 in 1986, and that consumption was 82 percent of GNP. Adjusting for household size and converting to monthly figures yields a crude monthly household consumption of US$ 120. We would expect Kumasi's consumption to be somewhat higher than the national average.

Owner households have a higher median monthly consumption (C16,300) than any other tenure group but this cannot be regarded as high enough to set them apart as a separate class. Furthermore, their larger household size (see below) reduced their per capita consumption to C3100, almost C400 lower than renters. Figure 3.6 presents the distribution of consumption by tenure. Not surprisingly, owners' consumptions are generally higher. The other three groups -- renters, family housers and sub-renters have roughly similar distributions.