Consumption, Health, Gender, and Poverty

Case, Anne ; Deaton, Angus

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: CONSUMPTION PATTERNS;    HEALTH ASPECTS OF POVERTY;    GENDER GAP;    POVERTY INCIDENCE;    POVERTY MEASUREMENT;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-3020
RP-ID  :  WPS3020

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Standard methods of measuring povertyassume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in afamily whose income or consumption lies below an appropriatepoverty line. Such methods provide only limited insight intomale and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there arereasons why household resources are linked to the gendercomposition of the household: women's earnings areoften lower than men's; families in some countriescontrol their fertility through differential stopping rules;and women live longer than men. It is also possible to linkfamily expenditure patterns to the gender composition of thehousehold, something the authors illustrate using data fromIndia and South Africa. Such a procedure provides usefulinformation on who gets what, but cannot tell us how totalresources are allocated between males and females. More canbe gleaned from data on consumption by individual householdmembers, and for many goods, collecting such information isgood survey practice in any case. Even so, it will be sometime before such information can be used routinely toproduce estimates of poverty by gender. A more promisingapproach is likely to come within a broader definition ofpoverty that includes health (and possibly education) aswell as income. The authors discuss recent work oncollecting self-reported measures of nonfatal health andargue that such measures are already useful for assessingthe relative health status of males and females. Theevidence is consistent with non-elderly women generallyhaving poorer health than non-elderly men. The authorsemphasize the importance of simultaneously measuring povertyin multiple dimensions. The different components ofwell-being are correlated, and it is misleading to look atany one in isolation from the others.