Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15925
Authors: Caitlin Brown; Rossella Calvi; Jacob Penglase
Abstract: Anti-poverty policies often aim to reach poor individuals by targeting poor households. However, intra-household inequality may mean some poor individuals reside in non-poor households. Using Bangladeshi data, we first show that undernourished individuals are spread across the household per-capita expenditure distribution. We then quantify the extent of total consumption inequality within families. We apply a novel approach to identify individual-level consumption within a collective household model and use the structural estimates to compute poverty rates separately for women, men, boys, girls, and the elderly. We find that women (especially older women) and children (later-born children in particular) face significant probabilities of living in poverty even in households with per-capita expenditure above the poverty line. This poverty misclassification is severe, as one third of poor individuals in our sample live in non-poor families.
Keywords: Intrahousehold resource allocation; Poverty; Collective model; Undernutrition; Bangladesh
JEL Codes: D1; I31; I32; J12; J13; O12; O15
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| undernourished individuals in Bangladesh (O15) | significant numbers living in nonpoor households (I32) |
| individual consumption varies significantly by gender and age (D12) | men consuming a larger share relative to women and children (D19) |
| allowing for unequal resource allocation within households (D13) | increases the overall extreme poverty rate from 17% to 27% (F63) |
| women, particularly older women and children, face high probabilities of living in poverty (I32) | households exceeding the poverty line (I32) |