In terms of food poverty, households with older heads tend to show higher poverty rates as well
SONAM PENJOR | Thimphu
Female-headed households are observed to be less poor than male-headed households.
However, the poverty rates are highest among households with very young heads, under 25 years of age, accounting to 13.3 percent and for those with heads over 65 years of age accounts to 20.9 percent.
On an average, family size does not vary much with the gender of the head of household. However, the gap in family size between poor and non-poor households is slightly wider for female-headed households, this is according to the Bhutan poverty analysis report 2022 which was published by National Statistics Bureau.
The report states that the poverty rates are similar in female and male-headed households. In fact, in both urban and rural areas, poverty rates are slightly larger in households led by a man with 4.6 percent and three percent led by a female in urban areas and for rural areas led by man accounting to 17.8 percent and female with 17 percent.
It further states that the food poverty is very low and shows no significant differences across the gender of the household head.
“Households led by man hold a larger share of poor population accounts to almost 68 percent,” the report states.
The report claims that female urban households hold the smaller share of poor population just with 2.5 percent and male headed rural households show the largest share with 57.3 percent.
Food poverty is also mainly concentrated in rural households led by a man with 63.3 percent.
Poverty varies strongly with educational attainment of the head of household. The report also states that poverty drops sharply with educational attainment: it is only one percent for households whose head has 12th grade or higher education.
It rises poverty rate to 18.7 percent for those households where the head did not attend school. This sharp decline is present in urban and rural areas alike, although urban areas show lower poverty rates irrespective of the educational attainment of the head of household.
The age of the household head is also correlated with poverty rates. The report shows that poverty rates are highest among households with very young heads under 25 years of age accounts to 13.3 percent and for those with heads over 65 years of age accounts to 20.9 percent.
However, the former group is rather small and thus accounts for a lower share of the poor population accounting to 1.8 percent, the latter accounts for over 20 percent of the poor. The former refers to the distance between a poor individual’s expenditure and the poverty line.
In terms of food poverty, households with older heads tend to show higher poverty rates as well.
When the head of the household was asked if he or she believed the household to be poor, the report found out that almost 13 percent of households reported that they considered themselves poor.
It states that the perceived poverty is higher among rural areas accounting to 16.6 percent and much lower in urban areas with 6.6 percent. “Perceived poverty, in rural as well as in urban areas, is consistent with monetary poverty.”
The report further states that the perception of poverty rises in groups that are labelled as poor by a monetary welfare indicator. The perceived poverty among the monetary poor is about 27 percent in the country, with a larger incidence in rural areas with 28.3 percent and a lower in urban areas with 16.6 percent.
A very few households perceived themself as “very poor”. Poor households differ from the rest of the population, both in terms of demographic composition and social characteristics.