Time Poverty And Household Welfare: Domestic Unpaid Work and Water Insecurity

Abstract

Time poverty and household welfare: Domestic unpaid work and water insecurity is an attempt to move away from an uni-dimensional poverty line defined only by money standards. In India, individuals are identified as poor if they spend less than a certain sum of money in a month (monthly per capita expenditure). A major issue with a poverty line only defined by money input is that it ends up grossly underestimating the extent of poverty, as it does not take into account one key implicit assumption- time. Time input is a crucial aspect in the scientific enquiry into poverty as there is a minimum amount of time required to undertake activities like sleeping, eating, personal hygiene etc., and these minimum requirements are non-substitutable, i.e. cannot be replaced with goods and services accessed through the market. Vickery (1977) proposed an alternative approach to the poverty threshold in her seminal work where she suggests a poverty isoquant, defined by time and money inputs as compared to a poverty line defined solely by money. Harvey and Mukhopadhyay (2007) further worked on the Vickery model by classifying types of time and revisited poverty estimates. Through this master‘s dissertation, adapted versions of these two existing models are used in the Indian context to estimate time-adjusted poverty estimates. Additionally, a probit model is used to delve into the influencing factors of time poverty. Unpaid work, as existing literature suggests, is highly gendered and the extent of unpaid work changes with income standards. A Tobit (Type I) model is used to analyse the factors that affect the time spent in unpaid work for six Indian states. Findings suggest that women are likely to spend as much as 30 hours more in unpaid work compared to men in a standard week, while individuals in a larger household spend less time compared to smaller households. In developing countries like India, as a result of lack of public infrastructure, the extent of time poverty increases as goods and services like water, fuel, fodder have to be produced by the household. This thesis takes the specific case of water insecurity and how it affects the overall time allocation within a household.