Intrahousehold Distribution and Child Poverty: Theory and Evidence from Côte d'Ivoire
Olivier Bargain,
Olivier Donni and
Prudence Kwenda
Additional contact information
Prudence Kwenda: University College Dublin
No 2011-031, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group
Abstract:
Poverty measures in developing countries often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption. In this paper, we extend the collective model of household consumption to recover mother's, father's and children's shares together with economies of scale, using the observation of adult-specific goods and an extended version of the Rothbarth method. The application on data from Côte d'Ivoire shows that children command a reasonable fraction of household resources, though not enough to avoid a very large extent of child poverty compared to what is found in traditional measures based on per capita expenditure. We find no significant evidence of discrimination against girls, and educated mothers have more command over household resources. Baseline results on children's shares are robust to using alternative identifying assumptions, which consolidates a general approach grounded on a flexible version of the Rothbarth method. Individual measures of poverty show that parents are highly compensated by the scale economies due to joint consumption.
Keywords: Collective Model; Consumer Demand; Engel Curves; Rothbarth Method; Cost of Children; Bargaining Power; Sharing rule; Scale Economies; Equivalence Scales; Indifference Scales (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 D31 I31 J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dem, nep-dev and nep-hme
Note: FI
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)
Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Bargai ... old-distribution.pdf First version, September, 2011 (application/pdf)
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:hka:wpaper:2011-031
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon (humcap@uchicago.edu).