Demography and poverty
Lipton, M.
World Bank Staff Working Paper, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 623: 127
1983
Document Number: 307178
National samples and village studies are used to examine the demographic characteristics of households at high risk of poverty or ultra-poverty. Before industrialization in now developed countries, such households were likely to be smaller than others; normally, the opposite is true in low income countries now. Yet status (job, asset-holding, etc.) continues to be positively linked to household size. These observations are traced to differences, over space and time, in marriage-age, fertility, family/household ratio, and family complexity, and to a lesser extent to differential mortality, migration, and life-cycle effects. The structure of households is also found to be important; poverty risk in today's less industrialized countries usually shows strong positive links with high child/adult ratios, weak negative links with age of household head, and very weak links with sex-composition. Scale economies to household consumption are little researched, but may also affect poverty risk. Many of these relationships weaken or vanish among the very poorest. Moreover, inferences to time-series (e.g. about what urbanization does to household size) are not unambiguous but suggest strong implications for poverty measurement if not for policy. Outlay per household is an almost useless poverty measure; outlay per person is almost as good as outlay per consumer unit for broad allocative purposes, though not for diagnosing the poverty problems of particular households. Demographic research, to assess how major policies affect big households with many children, could improve the poverty impact of many types of government action.