The Hunger of Old Women in Rural Tanzania: Can Subjective Data Improve Poverty Measurement?

On average, women in T anzania are slightly less likely than men to say that they are “always/often without enough food to eat”—but this masks a much higher rate of self‐reported food deprivation among elderly rural women. Official T anzanian poverty statistics are, however, based on a methodology which presumes equal sharing per equivalent adult within the household. This paper combines subjective and objective micro‐data from T anzania's 2007 Household Budget Survey and 2007 Views of the People Survey. By imputing individual consumption based on the relative probability of self‐reported food deprivation, it provides an example of the possible importance of one type of intra‐household inequality—i.e., the hunger of old women—for poverty measurement. Implications include the complexity of gendered intra‐household inequality and the importance of “technical” poverty measurement choices for public policy priorities, such as old age pensions.