The Effect Of A New Born On Household Poverty In Turkey:The Current Situation And Future Prospects By Simulations

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the causal relationship between fertility and poverty at household level in Turkey. This study basically focuses on micro level analysis. Such a study requires monitoring households throughout time to analyze the differences in their well-being occurring after the birth of a child. In addition to income and consumption expenditure, conventional poverty indicators based on consumption expenditure and income will be used along with fuzzy measures of poverty and deprivation index in a comparative way. The analysis throughout time is possible by making use of data from a panel survey where households are interviewed regularly at different times. For the case in Turkey, this type of data is only available from SILC (Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) Survey that monitors households within a four years of time span. Since SILC lacks consumption expenditure variable, this will be made available by statistical matching from the Household Budget Survey where such information exists. There are different suggested methods to analyze the causal effect of fertility on household well-being. The causal relationship analyses in this study employ propensity score matching (PSM) method. The findings indicate the households that had a child between the beginning and the end of the panel are worse-off in economical well-being, compared to households that did not have a child.