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 C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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