Sharing the Pie: An Analysis of Undernutrition and Individual Consumption in Bangladesh

Rossella Calvi, Caitlin Brown and Jacob Penglase

No 15925, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Anti-poverty policies often aim to reach poor individuals by targeting poor households. However, intra-household inequality may mean some poor individuals reside in non-poor households. Using Bangladeshi data, we first show that undernourished individuals are spread across the household per-capita expenditure distribution. We then quantify the extent of total consumption inequality within families. We apply a novel approach to identify individual-level consumption within a collective household model and use the structural estimates to compute poverty rates separately for women, men, boys, girls, and the elderly. We find that women (especially older women) and children (later-born children in particular) face significant probabilities of living in poverty even in households with per-capita expenditure above the poverty line. This poverty misclassification is severe, as one third of poor individuals in our sample live in non-poor families.

Keywords: Intra-household resource allocation; Poverty; Collective model; Undernutrition; Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 I31 I32 J12 J13 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15925 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Sharing the pie: An analysis of undernutrition and individual consumption in Bangladesh (2021)
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:cpr:ceprdp:15925

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15925

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().