Sharing the pie: An analysis of undernutrition and individual consumption in Bangladesh
中文摘要
反贫困政策通常旨在通过瞄准贫困家庭来惠及贫困个体。然而, 家庭内部不平等可能意味着一些贫困个体生活在非贫困家庭中。利用孟加拉国的数据, 我们首先表明, 营养不良个体分布于家庭人均支出分布的各个区间。随后, 我们量化了家庭内部总消费不平等的程度。我们在集体家庭模型框架下采用一种新方法来识别个体层面的消费, 并利用结构性估计分别计算了女性、男性、男孩、女孩以及老年人的贫困率。我们发现, 女性 (尤其是年长女性) 和儿童 (特别是出生顺位靠后的儿童) 即便在人均支出高于贫困线的家庭中, 也面临相当大的陷入贫困的概率。这种贫困错分问题十分严重: 在我们的样本中, 有三分之一的贫困个体生活在非贫困家庭中。
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.