THE HUNGER OF OLD WOMEN IN RURAL TANZANIA: CAN SUBJECTIVE DATA IMPROVE POVERTY MEASUREMENT?

On average, women in Tanzania 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 Tanzanian 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 Tanzania'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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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