A Multidimensional Approach to the Gender Gap in Poverty: An Application for Turkey

Abstract

Conventional poverty measures have long been criticized as a poor gauge of quality of life. Household-level income or expenditure data used in these measures are silent on intrahousehold inequalities and capture means to an end rather than outcomes and opportunities individuals face. This article constructs a multidimensional poverty index (MPI) to address these problems. It calculates multidimensional poverty for Turkey in four equally weighted dimensions: education, health, employment, and household living conditions. The study introduces employment as a distinct dimension of well-being, which is especially pertinent for the gender gap in poverty in the Turkish context. It finds a significant (30–34 percent) gender poverty gap, which is gradually narrowing over time. However, there is very little convergence between regions. Finally, results show households with multidimensionally poor women and non-poor men as the most common sub-group and an increase in the share of households with no poor members.

HIGHLIGHTS

• The study evaluates the multidimensional poverty of individuals to analyze gender gaps.

• Employment proxies for ignored functionings like self-respect and social inclusion.

• Gender poverty gap was between 30 and 34 percent during 2006–15.

• Gender poverty gap is only closing for the youngest cohorts.

• Within-household poverty disparities are high and stable during 2006–15.

KEYWORDS:

• Multidimensional poverty
• gender poverty gap
• intrahousehold inequality
• employment
• Survey of Income and Living Conditions
• Turkey

JEL Codes:

• D63
• I32
• J16

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research is funded by Kadir Has University Scientific Research Fund (BAP-2017-03). We thank Quentin Stoeffler for his detailed comments on an earlier draft. We also thank to the participants at EALE 2018 Conferences, 2018 IAFFE Conference, 4th Istanbul Meeting on Human Capital, and ITU and Boğaziçi University Economics Department seminar participants for helpful comments.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2021.2003837.

Notes

1 There are few studies that incorporate the employment dimension. Suppa (2018) defines employment deprivation by unemployment and Alkire and Apablaza (2017) by (quasi-) joblessness (household’s adult members are employed less than 20 percent of time). 

2 Lugo (2007) proposes to collect better data on a shortlist of employment indicators: informal employment, income from employment, occupational hazard, discouraged unemployed, under-over employment, and multiple activities. We incorporate informal employment in the first two MPI measures, discouraged unemployed in the second measure. We do not have data on occupational hazard. We have data on under-employment and employment income, but we prefer not to incorporate them into our measures. We discuss their exclusion in employment subsection.

3 The included data are from questions on (1) meeting family/friends at least once during previous month, at home or in public and (2) attending a public event.

4 These results including social participation are available from authors upon request. We thank anonymous referees for pointing out potential issues with the phrasing of the first question and the need for disaggregated data. 

5 Beginning September 2012, compulsory education in Turkey was raised to twelve years of schooling, affecting those born September 1997 and after. The students who are potentially affected by this do not show up in our dataset since the latest data in our sample is from 2015, and cohorts born after 1997 had not completed high school by 2015.

6 Espinoza-Delgado and Klasen (2018) point to the dearth of health-related questions in their data and opt for defining health deprivation by having suffered from a chronic disease or several diseases in the past month.

7 For the elderly (over 60 years old), Espinoza-Delgado and Klasen (2018) consider access to social protection instead of employment where an elderly person is considered deprived if she does not have access to retirement pensions or work income. We do not separately calculate social protection deprivation for the elderly and treat all non-working elderly without a pension as employment deprived according to the above definition.

8 SILC Turkey combines all pension income under a single question, that is, whether the person is retired from wage-employment, self-employment, or from the “voluntary insurance program” administered by the Social Security Administration where individuals start collecting retirement pensions once they complete the minimum number of contributions. Retirees of voluntarily insured program (very likely to be well-to-do) are also considered non-deprived in this definition.

9 From this point on we present further analysis of only the not-employed measure to save space. The further analyses of other two multidimensional measures are available from the authors.

10 We provide the level headcount ratio and MPI levels by age and region in Online Appendix Figures C5 and C6. Following Turkish Demographic and Health Surveys, we divide Turkey into five broad regions: West (TR1, TR2, TR3, and TR4), South (TR6), Central (TR5 and TR7), North (TR8 and TR9), and East (TRA, TRB, and TRC).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hasan Tekgüç

Hasan Tekgüç obtained his PhD in Economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2010. In his studies, he focuses on calculation of alternative poverty measures, impact evaluation of social assistance on poverty and inequality, and the distribution of education investment and the impact of Syrian migrants on natives’ employment in Turkey. He also studies the price transmission process in various animal product markets.

Bengi Akbulut

Bengi Akbulut received her BA from Bogazici University (2004) and PhD from University of Massachusetts Amherst (2011), both in economics. Her academic work is within the tradition of political economy and ecological economics. Her research focuses on the political economy of development and she has written extensively on the critiques of developmentalism and economic growth in general, and the interlinks between developmentalism and state hegemony in Turkeyin particular. A significant component of her research within the last five years has been on economic alternatives, including commons, forms of economic democracy, and degrowth, both from a conceptual and empirical perspective.