Population, Household Characteristics and Poverty

Abstract

There are numerous characteristics that poverty might be associated with, classified by regional, sector-specific, community, household and individual. Poverty is high in isolated areas of low rainfall, floods, and other inhospitable climatic conditions. There is a variety of community level characteristics that affect poverty, among which communication and other basic infrastructure are significant. The basic infrastructure generally includes proximity to paved roads, to large markets, whether or not the community has electricity, primary schools, medical clinics, NGO office, a bank, cooperative, and development project offices. At the household and individual level characteristics such as age structure of household members, sex composition, gender of the household head, and extent of participation in the labor force matter to poverty. In this chapter we shall not discuss regional, community or sectoral characteristics but demographic characteristics of sample households will be discussed in detail. The demographic characteristics of the households may be divided into three categories; (1) household size and structure, (2) dependency ratio and sex ratio, and (3) gender of the household heads.