Estimating the Effects of Aggregate Agricultural Growth on the Distribution of Expenditures

Abstract

Over the last several decades, the World Bank has accumulated a large number of datasets from a large number of countries which are based on household-level surveys, statistically representative of the populations of those countries, and which include data on non-durable expenditures. These data on expenditures can be used to measure economic welfare - indeed, this kind of measurement is a chief reason d’etre of this collection of survey data. Though the micro-data from these surveys are not generally available, the Bank provides data on aggregate expenditures by decile for many of these countries. Further, for many countries data from more than one year is available, so that it’s possible to construct an unbalanced panel of data on the level and distribution of expenditures for a number of countries over the last several decades. We also have data on country-level measures of agricultural income, as well as other aggregate income. The question: how do changes in the sectoral composition of income affect the distribution of expenditures across households within a country?