Child Poverty and Intra-Household Allocation

John Cockburn
Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) Research Network

Anyck Dauphin
Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada

Mohammad A. Razzaque
Commonwealth Secretariat, UK

Commonwealth Secretariat, UK

Citation: Cockburn, John, Anyck Dauphin and Mohammad A. Razzaque (2009). "Child Poverty and Intra-Household Allocation." Children, Youth and Environments 19 (2): 36-53. Retrieved [date] from http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/

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Abstract

Poverty is a concept that concerns the individual. However, the most common poverty indicator—income (or expenditures)—is measured at the household level and then simply divided by the number of members, or “adult equivalents,” in the household to obtain individual values. This assumes that all household members share fortunes and misfortunes equally, which is particularly problematic in the case of children. Parental altruism might lead some adults to sacrifice part of their resources in favor of their children. Alternatively, as a survival strategy, some parents may sacrifice the weakest of their children. This paper uses a recent and innovative Bangladeshi survey, including detailed information on individual calorie intake, to shed light on two questions. First, what is the role played by intra- household allocations in mitigating or exacerbating child poverty? Second, what is the scale of the measurement errors resulting from not considering intra-household allocation in the measurement of child poverty?

Keywords: children, poverty, intra-household resource allocation, equivalence scale, collective model