Designing Household Survey Questionnaires for Developing Countries Lessons from Ten Years of LSMS Experience, Chapter 17: Consumption

The measurement and understanding of living standards are overarching goals of the living standards surveys. Much of the focus is on poverty or deprivation, the lack of adequate living standards. Standard economic measure of deprivation are concerned with the lack of goods, or the lack of resources -- income, expenditure, or assets -- with which to obtain goods. But it is always important to keep in mind that many of the most important aspects of deprivation go beyond purely material deprivation. Deprivation of health, deprivation of education, deprivation of freedom from crime, and deprivation of political liberty are all important?and often more important than deprivation of material living standards. The role of development in freeing people from deprivation in a wide sense has been forcefully argued by Amartya Sen, see Sen (1999) for a recent and comprehensive account. Data from the living standards surveys frequently help us take a broad view of poverty, particularly data from the modules on health and education. Other important aspects of broadly construed living standards, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, or the threat of crime, must be constructed in other ways. Nevertheless, measuring the material basis of living standards will always play an important role in the assessment of levels of living, and how to collect data for a consumption-based measure is the topic of this chapter.