Female-Headed Households and Poverty: Evidence from the National Family Health Survey

This paper estimates whether female-headed households are poorer than their male-headed counterparts, using household data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for the year 2005-06. I use poverty measures that reflect on people’s permanent income such as housing condition, wealth index and standard of living index, and argue that these measures could be more informative about the chronic living condition of people than the official measure based on consumption expenditure. Employing probit and logit estimations, the results from the analysis provide evidence that the relationship between female-headed households and poverty depends on the choice of poverty measure. Specifically, poverty measures based on the housing condition and the wealth indices show that female-headed households are less poor than male-headed households. However, based on the standard of living index measure of poverty, female-headed households are marginally poorer than their male-headed counterparts.