Aging and death under a dollar a day

This paper uses household survey data from several developing countries to investigate whether the poor - defined as those living under $1 or $2 dollars a day at PPP (purchasing power parity) - and the non poor have different mortality rates in old age.

The authors used the Living Standard Measurement Surveys (LSMS) conducted by the World Bank and the Family Life Surveys from the Rand Corporation, to assess data from Brazil, Bangladesh, Cote d’Ivoire, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, and East Timor.

The approaches they took to interpret the data include the following assessments:

• age pyramids: missing old people? One first approach, (although the authors highlight its limitations) to get at the question of “excess” mortality is to look at the age distribution of the population: is the number of older people in the population unusually low?
• a new measure of adult mortality: Are your parents alive? The authors construct a proxy measure of longevity, which is the probability that an adult's mother and father are alive. The non-poor's mothers are more likely to be alive than the poor's mothers. This quick panorama based on whether parents are alive seems to establish that in many countries, at least among women, the poor have higher adult mortality than the non-poor

Using panel data set for Indonesia and Vietnam, they also find that older adults are significantly more likely to have died five years later if they are poor. The direction of causality is unclear: the poor may be poor because they are sick (and thus more likely to die), or they could die because they are poor.

The authors conclude that they are tempted to interpret the evidence accumulated in this paper as revealing, at least in part, that poverty does kill.