Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/58618 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 6029
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Poverty measures in developing countries often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption. In this paper, we extend the collective model of household consumption to recover mother's, father's and children's shares together with economies of scale, using the observation of adult-specific goods and an extended version of the Rothbarth method. The application on data from Côte d'Ivoire shows that children command a reasonable fraction of household resources, though not enough to avoid a very large extent of child poverty compared to what is found in traditional measures based on per capita expenditure. We find no significant evidence of discrimination against girls, and educated mothers have more command over household resources. Baseline results on children's shares are robust to using alternative identifying assumptions, which consolidates a general approach grounded on a flexible version of the Rothbarth method. Individual measures of poverty show that parents are highly compensated by the scale economies due to joint consumption.
Subjects: 
collective model
consumer demand
Engel curves
Rothbarth method
cost of children
bargaining power
sharing rule
scale economies
equivalence scales
indifference scales
JEL: 
D11
D12
D36
I31
J12
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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