The Hunger of Old Women in Rural Tanzania: How subjective data could improve poverty measurement

Although women in Tanzania are, on average, slightly less likely than men to say that they are "always/often without enough food to eat", this masks a much higher rate of self- reported food deprivation among elderly rural women. However, official Tanzanian poverty statistics use a “food energy intake” methodology which assumes “equal sharing” within the household, and equivalence scales which imply that poverty among both male and female elderly is similar to the general population. This paper combines subjective and objective micro-data from Tanzania’s 2007 Household Budget Survey and 2007 Views of the People Survey. By imputing individual consumption based on the relative probability of food deprivation, we assess the importance of intra-household inequality – i.e. the hunger of old women – for poverty measurement. The general implications are the complexity of gendered intra-household inequality and the importance of ‘technical’ poverty measurement choices for public policy issues like the relative priority of old age pensions.