Do Households Prioritise Children? Intra-Household Deprivation a Case Study of the South Pacific
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Do Households Prioritise Children? Intra-Household Deprivation a Case Study of the South Pacific Alba Lanau 1
& Viliami
Fifita 2
Accepted: 9 March 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract There is increasing evidence of unequal access to resources within the household between children and adults. The literature suggests that patterns of intra-household inequality are context specific: while some find that households prioritise children (Main and Bradshaw 2016), others find that children are more likely to experience the consequences of poverty (Brown et al. 2018a). In Tonga, the high value of children, role of women in decision making and low extreme poverty rates suggest that households will prioritise children. However, the data does not match this expectation. Where possible households share resources equally. In contexts of low resources, both adults and children may be prioritised. This article builds on the methodology developed by Main and Bradshaw to provide the first analysis of intra-household inequalities between children and adults in the South Pacific. It argues that deprivation patterns are shaped both by household decisions on resource allocation and by wider access to resources. The approach used can be applied in other contexts to explore deprivation patterns and inform anti-poverty strategies. The article contributes to the growing literature on intra-household inequalities between children and adults. Keywords Child poverty . Deprivation . Intra-household . Inequality . Children . South
Pacific
* Alba Lanau [email protected] Viliami Fifita [email protected]
1
Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics, Barcelona, Spain
2
Tonga Bureau of Statistics, Nuku’alofa, Tonga
A. L. Sanchez, V. Fifita
1 Introduction Poverty is often measured at the household level as households tend to share both resources (e.g. earnings, farming produce) and expenses. Under this model children living in poor or deprived households are themselves categorised as poor. For instance, Mood and Jonsson (2016, p. 827) define child poverty as “a lack of economic resources – stemming from the household’s economy or their own – that prevents children from participating as equals in social life”. The decision to measure poverty at the household level relies on two assumptions that have been identified as problematic a) that household level indicators are a good reflection of the standards of living of both children and adults, and b) that resources are evenly shared among household members. With regard to the first assumption, it is increasingly recognised that children have specific needs compared with adults e.g. in terms of education, nutrition and so on (Minujin and Nandy 2012; Delamonica 2014). Since the needs of children and adults are different, their living standards can also be different even within households with equal sharing of resources (Gordon and Nandy 2012; Guio et al. 2017). Furthermore, there is increasing evidence of unequal access to resources within households (Klasen and Lahoti 2016; de Vreyer and Lambert 2
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