The effect of transfers on household expenditure patterns and poverty in South Africa

By Pushkar Maitra, R. Ray. 2003

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper uses household level unit record data from South Africa to examine the behavioural and welfare impacts of private and public transfers. We allow for joint endogeneity of resource variables and the expenditure shares. Our results show that crowding out of private transfers as a result of the introduction of public pensions holds only for poor households and not for the non-poor. Both private transfers and public pensions significantly reduce poverty but private transfers have a larger impact on expenditure patterns. The results also reject the hypothesis of income pooling underlying the conventional unitary model by finding that the marginal impact on expenditures are different for public pension received, private transfer received and other resources flowing into the household. The principal conclusions are robust to changes in specification.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc8aba4be51ad7757d48cbd395dafcfa520ac06a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Donald Cox
2. Marcel Fafchamps
3. C. Cattaneo
4. Barry Reilly
5. Jörgen W. Weibull
6. Ingela Alger
7. A. Castaldo
8. John Rand

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Donald Cox
2. Marcel Fafchamps
3. Jörgen W. Weibull
4. Ingela Alger
5. C. Cattaneo
6. Barry Reilly
7. A. Castaldo
8. B. Minten

In Gender Studies

1. Marcel Fafchamps
2. C. Cattaneo
3. Barry Reilly
4. Donald Cox
5. A. Castaldo
6. Francesco Bosello
7. A. Quisumbing

Citations in the corpus

• Who Cares about Relative Deprivation (2005, unknown): “…literature assessing the safety-net role of private transfers and other forms of support in poor countries; see, for example, Ravallion and Dearden (1988), Coate and Ravallion (1993), Murgai et al. (2002), Ligon et al., (2002), Fafchamps and Lund (2003), Maitra and Ray (2003) and Cox et al. (2004).”
• Extended Family and Kinship Networks: Economic Insights and Evolutionary Directions (2008, background): “Udry (1996) cites the practice of domestic violence in West Africa as prima facie evidence against Pareto Optimality in household allocations; and Bloch and Rao (2002) present direct evidence of the role violence plays in such allocations in their case study of a potter community in South India.”
• Kinship, Incentives, and Evolution (2010, background): “7 Cox, Hansen, and Jimenez (2004), and Maitra and Ray (2003) …nd fairly strong evidence that, for”
• DO MIGRANT REMITTANCES AFFECT THE CONSUMPTION PATTERNS OF ALBANIAN HOUSEHOLDS (2007, methodology): “These include Maitra and Ray (2003), Zarate-Hoyos (2004), Adams (2005) and Taylor and Mora (2006).”
• Migrants’ International Transfers and Educational Expenditure: Empirical Evidence from Albania (2010, background): “Maitra and Ray (2003) use the same data set from South Africa, but they develop a complete system framework with budget shares, and account for possible sequentiality between pension income, remittances and other resource flows.”