PHA-Exchange> Consumption, health, gender and poverty

[claudio]

From: "Ruggiero, Mrs. Ana Lucia (WDC)"

> Consumption, health, gender and poverty
 Anne Case and Angus Deaton
 Research Program in Development Studies
Princeton University
>
> Working Paper No:3020, April 8, 2003
> World Bank Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network.
>
> Available online as PDF file [69p.] at:
> <http://econ.worldbank.org/files/25577_wps3020.pdf>
>
> ".. This paper is concerned with methods for measuring poverty that allow
> men and women to be differentially poor. Standard methods of poverty
> measurement assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a
family
> whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such
> methods can provide only limited insight into male and female poverty
> separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why household resources are
> linked to the gender composition of the household; women's earnings are
> often lower than men, families in some countries control their fertility
> through differential stopping rules, and women live longer than men. It is
> also possible to link family expenditure patterns to the gender
composition
> of the household, something the authors illustrate using data from India
and
> South Africa.
>
> Such a procedure provides useful information on who gets what, but cannot
> tell us how total resources are allocated between males and females. More
> can be gleaned from data on consumption by individual household members,
and
> for many goods, collecting such information is good survey practice in any
> case. Even so, it will be some time before such information can be used
> routinely to produce estimates of poverty by gender. A more promising
> approach is likely to come within a broader definition of poverty that
> includes health (and possibly education) as well as income.
>
> The authors discuss recent work on collecting self-reported measures of
> nonfatal health and argue that such measures are already useful for
> assessing the relative health status of males and females. The evidence is
> consistent with non-elderly women generally having poorer health than
> non-elderly men. The authors emphasize the importance of simultaneously
> measuring poverty in multiple dimensions. The different components of
> well-being are correlated, and it is misleading to look at any one in
> isolation from the others...."