Consumption Inequality and Multidimensional Child Poverty in Ghana: Does Access to Communal Services Matter?

This paper examines the association between consumption inequality and multidimensional child poverty using the seventh round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey, augmented with administrative data sourced at the district level. Consumption inequality is measured using the Gini coefficient based on per capita household consumption expenditure at the district level. We draw on the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative’s approach to measure child poverty as a multidimensional construct of deprivations in children's survival, development, and safety needs. Employing the control function procedure, our main finding is that consumption inequality is positively correlated with child poverty. This evidence is consistent across different measures of inequality and child poverty. We also find that consumption inequality is positively associated with child poverty more for male than female children and for all children residing in rural areas and households with a disability. Relatively, consumption inequality has the largest positive correlation magnitude, firstly, with children's survival deprivations and secondly, with their developmental indices after survival. The findings further identify distortions in access to communal and social services in education, health and finance as potential channels through which consumption inequality increases child poverty. We suggest policies to address adverse child welfare outcomes in Ghana.