Considering intra-household inequalities to better guide public aid in Senegal

Measuring poverty and inequality in a country is a central concern for development economists. This study will help guide policy measures to help people living below the poverty line.

This measure is generally based on household consumption surveys, which fail to take account of the inequalities that can exist within the same household. In Senegal, the household structure is complex, with several generations living together or several members of the same sibling with their respective wives. Each household subgroup may have its own budget, and access to resources may differ greatly from one individual to another within the same household.

To take account of these disparities, in partnership with the ANSD, a large-scale quantitative survey was carried out in Senegal involving 18,000 individuals in 2,000 different households. In this survey, the measurement of household consumption is based on interviews with all adult members of the household with budgetary responsibilities. This method provides a more complete picture of household consumption and shows how it is distributed between members. The study reports a 15% increase in household consumption compared with the results obtained from the national survey carried out the same year using the traditional method, which generally only interviews one person per household. This difference is essentially due to non-poor households. In fact, the richer the households, the more the standard surveys underestimate their consumption. Real inequality in this economy is therefore higher than previously thought. Thus, for example, the Gini coefficient, which measures the level of inequality in the distribution of consumption within a country, rises from 0.42 in the traditional survey to 0.5 in this study, putting Senegal in the group of highly unequal countries.

In a completely new way, it also reveals major inequalities within households. These inequalities are such that within households whose per capita consumption level is above the poverty line, there are members who live on very few resources. These poor people are invisible because they live in a household that is not poor.

In total, 13.4% of poor people would not be identified as such using standard surveys because they are part of households living above the poverty line. It is therefore important to get as close as possible to individuals in order to obtain more accurate measures of the level of poverty and help public policies to better achieve their targets. Using this new survey for Senegal, in which consumption data was collected at a disaggregated level, this article quantifies the biases associated with data collection that fails to take account of how households function. In total, two opposing effects, one on the average and the other on inequalities, offset each other in terms of the overall poverty rate, but individual poverty statuses are affected. This study also revealed that household structure and organisation are key correlates of inequality within the household and of the individual risk of poverty.