The widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy. The scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view. We find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in Pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0-6. This turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales. By contrast, some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity. Considerations of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non-robustness of demographic profiles of poverty. Copyright 1995 by Royal Economic Society.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 105 (1995) Issue (Month): 433 (November) Pages: 1415-34 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.