Intra-household inequalities: empirical evidence and implications for rural poverty reduction policies

Even though there is a large consensus that it is an individual condition, poverty is usually measured using household aggregated data. At the same time, many social policies in developing countries, including food security and nutrition interventions, try to reach deprived individuals by targeting poor households. However, differently from what standard poverty measures assume, there is often substantial inequality in the distribution of resources within households. The consequence is that poverty reduction policies might fail to identify the households where most deprived individuals live and/or reach those deprived individuals within their households. In this webinar, Caitlin Brown will address the issue of intra-household inequality in the context of poverty measurement. She will discuss the challenges of identifying intra-household inequality and the consequences that accounting for it might have on current poverty numbers. Her presentation will provide an overview of existing empirical evidence on intra-household inequality in nutritional outcomes, caloric intake, resource shares as well as discrimination against certain household members.  Finally, it will analyze the implications for targeting rural poverty reduction policies.

 SPEAKER:

Caitlin Brown is Assistant Professor with the School of Public Policy at Central European University. She has a Ph.D. in Economics from Georgetown University and previously worked as a Consultant with the Development Research Group (DECRG) at the World Bank. She is interested in issues related to poverty measurement, intra-household inequality, gender, and economic development more broadly and has previously published in the Journal of Development Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics.