Household-level data on consumer expenditures underpins a wide range of empirical research in modern economics, spanning microand macroeconomics. This research includes work on consumption and saving, on poverty and inequality, and on risk sharing and insurance. We review different ways in which such data can be collected or captured: traditional detailed budget surveys, less onerous survey pro...

This paper looks into the relations between economic growth and poverty reduction in Jamaica. A poverty profile is constructed, based on household budget survey data, and per capita growth is decomposed into pure growth effects and changes in inequality effects. I find that growth has contributed to poverty reduction mainly because there has not been any large increases in inequality. However, ...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income and consumption inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989–90. Using microdata from the 1985–92 Household Budget Surveys, we find that overall income inequality increased in 1989 but subsequently declined to pretransition levels. The distribution of consumption reveals a similar pattern. Social...

This paper tests for the endogeneity of one of the main elements separating different models of intrahousehold allocations, namely the household information set. Based on unusually rich data, I find that split migrant couples in the Nairobi slums invest considerable resources into information acquisition through visits, sibling and child monitoring, budget submissions, and marital search. I als...

The theory of compensatory consumption suggests that a possible lack of traditional avenues for fulfilling needs for social status may lead ethnic minorities to shift measures of social status from traditional indicators such as occupational prestige to consumption indicators of status conveying goods. In this study we investigate whether a household’s ethnic identity affects its budget allocat...

The chapter addresses some issues on survey design and sample design for household budget surveys. The focus is on surveys in developing countries. Problems of measuring consumption and income are discussed in some detail in section II. Section III contains a discussion on some crucial sample design issues, e.g., stratification, sample allocation in space (geographical) and in time (over the fu...

How this statement should be interpreted? Clearly, it refers to income or total expenditure and budget shares for food (food share for short) for different households in a given population at a given period and not to changing (different) income of a given household. Food share is sometimes defined as consumption expenditures in current prices on food items divided by income but also by consump...

This paper reV1ews trends in income inequality and poverty over the past 15 years and offers projections of the effect that present and proposed budget changes may exert on the income distribution in the next four years. Income inequality has been increasing in the last 15 years, a fact accounted for in part by demographic change in household structure and 1n part by such labor market forces as...

In this paper we estimate quadratic food Engel curves with measurement error using the 1994 Ethiopian Urban Household Budget Survey. In sharp contrast to the findings from developed countries, food share is found to increase with expenditure, and only starts to decline after some threshold level of expenditure. We establish the robustness of this inverted-U relationship by estimating a more fle...

In this paper I develop a Proxy Means Tests (PMT) model and examine several targeting lines based on 2008 household survey data to identify beneficiaries for a targeting subsidy scheme in Iran. Based on the findings of this study, setting a cut-off percentile of 40% is expected to provide compensation for almost 70 percent of the poorest households. This will result in the highest accuracy main...