How Serious is the Neglect of Intra-Household Inequality in Multi-Dimensional Poverty Indices?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractIncome-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias depends on how these measures use individual data to determine the poverty status of households, while the impact of these assumptions on inequality between individual cannot be determined a priori. We then use data from the 2012 Indian Human Development Survey to create a standard household-based MPIs closely related to the MPI proposed by Alkire and Santos (2014) as well as UNDP (2014), and compare that to an individual level MPI that individualizes education and nutrition and some aspects of the living standards dimensions. We find that the poverty rate of females is 14 percentage points higher than that of men in our individual MPI measure but only 2 percentage points higher when using the household-based measure. Similarly, the age differentials in poverty are much larger using the individual-based measure. Using a decomposable inequality measure, we find the contribution of intrahousehold inequality to the total inequality in the individual deprivation score inequality to be 30% and total inequality is also some 30% higher using the individual-based measure, while inequality among the poor is found to be 5% smaller using the individual measure.

Combining Growth and Gender Diagnostics for the Benefit of Both

“…Malawi), the estimated consumption allocation within the household is unequal and the gender poverty gap surpasses more than 20 percentage points in some cases. Klasen and Lahoti (2016) estimate the gender gap in education and conclude that this gap is much larger using individual rather than household measures in a diverse set of countries, including Iraq, Tanzania, Mexico, Indonesia, and Ecuador. Finally, Munoz Boudet et al (2018) show that the gender gap in poverty varies along the life cycle and they find that women are more likely to experience poverty than men during their youth and reproductive years.…”

Inequality, Poverty, and the Intra-Household Allocation of Consumption in Senegal

“…Recent attempts at describing intra-household resource allocation with non-monetary measures of poverty also exist. Klasen and Lahoti (2016) study inter-individual inequality in India using individual multidimensional poverty indices (MPI), compared with the distribution of a household-based MPI. They find that intra-household inequality accounts for 30% of total inequality.…”

Gender and multidimensional poverty in Nicaragua: An individual based approach

“…In fact, as far as we know, there are only two papers that have evaluated individual-based multidimensional poverty across the entire population. The first one is the work by Klasen and Lahoti (2016), where they proposed a framework to measure multidimensional poverty and inequality at the individual level and applied it for the case of India. They found that poverty among females is 14 percentages point larger than among males in their individual MPI measure but only 2 percentage points higher when using a household-based measure.…”