Measured as Poor versus Feeling Poor: Comparing Money-metric and Subjective Poverty Rates in South Africa

Dorrit Posel and Michael Rogan

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 2016, vol. 17, issue 1, 55-73

Abstract: In this study, we compare subjective and money-metric measures of poverty in South Africa using data collected in the 2008/09 Living Conditions Survey (LCS). In addition to collecting detailed information on expenditure, the LCS asked respondents to provide an assessment of the economic status of their household, ranging from “very poor” to “wealthy”. We find considerable overlap between per-capita expenditure measures of poverty status and subjective poverty status among households. However, we also identify a number of significant characteristics that distinguish households where poverty measures do not overlap, including household size, the share of children and the elderly in the household, home ownership and housing type, access to piped water and electricity, and access to farming land. These characteristics suggest both that expenditure measures are not able to capture the multidimensional nature of economic well-being and that the level of expenditure in the household is underestimated. This underestimation may arise partly because poverty measures based on per-capita expenditure do not recognize scale economies in the household, and also because the value of small-scale economic activities can be difficult to measure, as in the case of subsistence farming.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/19452829.2014.985198 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jhudca:v:17:y:2016:i:1:p:55-73

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CJHD20

DOI: 10.1080/19452829.2014.985198

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Human Development and Capabilities is currently edited by Kathryn Rosenblum

More articles in Journal of Human Development and Capabilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().