Children First? Intra-Household Inequality in Reconstituted Couple Households

An increasing number of children are growing up in reconstituted households, formed by a couple and a non-common child. Reconstituted households tend to be poorer, which is associated with worse behavioural and developmental outcomes. Additionally, there is evidence that non-common children receive less economic support from their parents upon leaving the parental home. Using age-specific deprivation data collected in the 2014 European Survey on Income and Living Conditions this article compares the allocation of resources in reconstituted and intact couple households. It shows that indeed, children in reconstituted households are more likely to be deprived compared to those in intact households. However, it finds no evidence that reconstituted households are less likely to prioritise children. The findings hold across welfare regimes. Women are more likely to go without compared with men, although differences are small.

Intrahousehold Resource Allocation and Individual Poverty: Assessing Collective Model Predictions Against Direct Evidence on Sharing

Welfare analyses conducted by policy practitioners around the world usually rely on equivalised or per-capita expenditures and ignore the extent of within-household inequality. Recent advances in the estimation of collective models suggest ways to retrieve the complete sharing process within families using homogeneity assumptions (typically preference stability upon exclusive goods across individuals or household types) and the observation of exclusive goods. So far, the prediction of these models has not been validated, essentially because intrahousehold allocation is seldom observed. We provide such a validation by leveraging a unique dataset from Bangladesh, which contains information on the fully individualised expenditures of each family member. We also test the core assumption (efficiency) and homogeneity assumptions used for identification. It turns out that the collective model predicts individual resources reasonably well when using clothing, i.e., one of the rare goods commonly assignable to male, female and children in standard expenditure surveys. It also allows identifying poor individuals in non-poor households while the traditional approach understates poverty among the poorest individuals.

Correction to: Beyond the Annual and Aggregate Measurement of Household Inequality: The Case Study of Lake Naivasha Basin, Kenya

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-021-00394-0

Assessing Classic Maya multi-scalar household inequality in southern Belize

Inequality is present to varying degrees in all human societies, pre-modern and contemporary. For archaeological contexts, variation in house size reflects differences in labor investments and serves as a robust means to assess wealth across populations small and large. The Gini coefficient, which measures the degree of concentration in the distribution of units within a population, has been employed as a standardized metric to evaluate the extent of inequality. Here, we employ Gini coefficients to assess wealth inequality at four nested socio-spatial scales–the micro-region, the polity, the district, and the neighborhood–at two medium size, peripheral Classic Maya polities located in southern Belize. We then compare our findings to Gini coefficients for other Classic Maya polities in the Maya heartland and to contemporaneous polities across Mesoamerica. We see the patterning of wealth inequality across the polities as a consequence of variable access to networks of exchange. Different forms of governance played a role in the degree of wealth inequality in Mesoamerica. More autocratic Classic Maya polities, where principals exercised degrees of control over exclusionary exchange networks, maintained high degrees of wealth inequality compared to most other Mesoamerican states, which generally are characterized by more collective forms of governance. We examine how household wealth inequality was reproduced at peripheral Classic Maya polities, and illustrate that economic inequity trickled down to local socio-spatial units in this prehispanic context.

Beyond the Annual and Aggregate Measurement of Household Inequality: The Case Study of Lake Naivasha Basin, Kenya

This paper investigates household seasonal food expenditure inequality in the rural Lake Naivasha Basin, Kenya using the extended decomposition of Gini and primary data referred from February 2018 to January 2019. The new elements introduced by the paper are the disaggregation of the food expenditure by source of access (purchase, auto-consumption, and gifts); inclusion of traditional species in the food categories; the features of the area investigated; a novel focus on household economic disparities in flower enclave; and the comparison between the annual and monthly level of inequality to understand the seasonality in household inequality. The results highlight the positive contribution of the subsistence sector to the reduction of inequality during the harvesting period of respective food category; and the need for a well-coordinated set of poverty, food security and agricultural development policies to contribute to the achievement of the first goal of Agenda 2030.