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The Hunger of Old Women in Rural T anzania: Can Subjective Data Improve Poverty Measurement?
Author(s) -
Osberg Lars
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/roiw.12128
Subject(s) - poverty , consumption (sociology) , inequality , economics , demographic economics , survey data collection , time use survey , measuring poverty , economic growth , sociology , statistics , mathematical analysis , social science , mathematics , work (physics) , mechanical engineering , engineering
On average, women in T anzania are slightly less likely than men to say that they are “always/often without enough food to eat”—but this masks a much higher rate of self‐reported food deprivation among elderly rural women. Official T anzanian poverty statistics are, however, based on a methodology which presumes equal sharing per equivalent adult within the household. This paper combines subjective and objective micro‐data from T anzania's 2007 Household Budget Survey and 2007 Views of the People Survey. By imputing individual consumption based on the relative probability of self‐reported food deprivation, it provides an example of the possible importance of one type of intra‐household inequality—i.e., the hunger of old women—for poverty measurement. Implications include the complexity of gendered intra‐household inequality and the importance of “technical” poverty measurement choices for public policy priorities, such as old age pensions.