Understanding Poverty among the Elderly in India: Implications for Social Pension Policy

Sarmistha Pal () and Robert Palacios ()
Additional contact information
Robert Palacios: World Bank

No 3431, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: The Government of India is implementing a new policy which dramatically increases funding for a cash transfer program targeted to the poor elderly. The expansion of this ‘social pension’ in terms of coverage and benefit levels is taking place with little understanding of poverty among India’s elderly or its determinants. This paper finds that households with elderly members do not have higher poverty rates than non-elderly households. This result is robust under various measures that take into account the size and composition of households. Separate evidence suggests that part of the explanation for this phenomenon is that the poor have higher mortality rates and are therefore underrepresented. This explanation has important implications for social pension policy and suggests that programs that reduce elderly mortality may actually increase the relative poverty levels of the elderly.

Keywords: old age poverty; household demographic composition; adjusted poverty indices; elderly contribution; survivorship bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cwa and nep-hap
Date: Written 2008-04
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp3431.pdf (application/pdf)

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

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().