Estimating Households’ Expenditures on Disability in Africa: The Uses and Limitations of the Standard of Living Method

Daniel Mont (), Zachary Morris, Mercoledi Nasiir and Nanette Goodman
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Daniel Mont: Center for Inclusive Policy, Washington, DC 20005, USA
Zachary Morris: School of Social Welfare, State University of New York-Stony Brook, Suffolk County, NY 11794, USA
Mercoledi Nasiir: Prospera, Jakarta 12190, Indonesia
Nanette Goodman: Syracuse University College of Law, Burton Blatt Institute, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 23, 1-17

Abstract: People with disabilities face extra costs of living to participate in the social and economic lives of their communities on an equal basis with people without disabilities. If these extra costs are not accounted for, then their economic wellbeing will be overestimated. The Standard of Living (SOL) method is a way of generating these estimates and is thus useful for determining the economic impact of those costs in the current environment. However, previous studies have used different indicators for disability and different measures of the standard of living, so it is hard to compare estimates across different countries. This study applies a consistent set of indicators across seven African countries to produce comparable estimates. Our estimates of the extra costs of living in these lower-income countries are much lower than the results produced for higher-income countries in prior work. We argue that this finding highlights the limitations of the SOL method as a useful source of information for developing inclusive systems of social protection in lower-income countries because it captures what households spend but not what the person with a disability needs to fully participate in the social and economic lives of their community. In lower-income countries, people with disabilities are likely to have fewer opportunities to spend on needed items thus resulting in substantial unmet need for disability-related goods and services. Failing to account for these unmet needs can lead to inadequate systems of social protection if they are based solely on SOL estimates.

Keywords: disability; Africa; extra costs; standard of living (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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