Impact of Household Size and Family Composition on Poverty in Rural India

J.V. Meenakshi and Ranjan Ray

ASARC Working Papers from The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre

Abstract: This paper utilises micro data on consumption, family composition and land ownership of nearly 70,000 rural Indian households to analyse poverty in rural India. The study, conducted at the disaggregated level of individual States, examines the impact of household size and composition, caste, gender of household head, and size of land ownership on a household’s poverty status. The introduction of consumption economies of household size and of adult/child consumption relativities affect the poverty estimates but not the State poverty rankings. Scheduled castes/tribes are more vulnerable to poverty than others. In contrast, female headed households display, in many States, higher poverty only in the presence of size economies and adult/child relativities. However, the latter result is not always true. On this and in several other respects, the study finds sharp differences between the constituent States of the Indian Union.

Keywords: Economies of Household Size; Adult Equivalence Scales; Head Count Poverty Rate; Land Deprivation; Female Headed Households; Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D63 I32 J18 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2000-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/acde/asarc/pdf/papers/2000/WP2000_02.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Impact of household size and family composition on poverty in rural India (2002)
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:pas:asarcc:2000-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ASARC Working Papers from The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Raghbendra Jha ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).