Angus Deaton

Anne Case

While the rise in premature deaths among American working-class whites has become a national crisis, the authors tie the problem to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and to a health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages to the wealthy

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Standard methods of measuring poverty assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why household resources are linked to the gender composition of the household: women's earnings are often lower than men's; families in some countries control their fertility through differential stopping rules; and women live longer than men. It is also possible to link family expenditure patterns to the gender composition of the household, something Case and Deaton illustrate using data from India and South Africa. Such a procedure provides useful information on who gets what, but cannot tell us how total resources are allocated between males and females. More can be gleaned from data on consumption by individual household members, and for many goods, collecting such information is good survey practice in any case. Even so, it will be some time before such information can be used routinely to produce estimates of poverty by gender. A more promising approach is likely to come within a broader definition of poverty that includes health (and possibly education) as well as income. The authors discuss recent work on collecting self-reported measures of nonfatal health and argue that such measures are already useful for assessing the relative health status of males and females. The evidence is consistent with non-elderly women generally having poorer health than non-elderly men. The authors emphasize the importance of simultaneously measuring poverty in multiple dimensions. The different components of well-being are correlated, and it is misleading to look at any one in isolation from the others. This paper--a product of Gender and Development, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network--is part of a larger effort in the network to understand the gender dimension and public policy.

Consumption, Health, Gender, and Poverty

We examine the social pension in South Africa, where large cash sumsþabout twice the median per capita income of African householdsþare paid to people qualified by age but irrespective of previous contributions. We present the history of the scheme and use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers, documenting who receives the pensions, their levels of living, and those of their families. We also look at behavioral effects, particularly the effects of the cash receipts on the allocation of income to food, schooling, transfers, and savings. Two methodological issues run through our analysis. The first is the danger of interpreting simple correlations and regressions without adequate consideration of likely biases. The second is the problem of measuring the effects of a program that is determined by individual or household characteristics. We examine both in the context of the South African pension. Our results are consistent with the view that pension income is spent in much the same way as other income, and that a rand is a rand, regardless of its source.

D.M. Davis

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