Impact of Housing Environment on Poverty

Abstract

Poverty has several dimensions and multi formation.Usually it is defined by focusing narrowly on income poverty or broadly by including lack of access to opportunities for raising standards of living. Strategies aimed at poverty reduction need to identify factors that are strongly associated with poverty and agreeable to modification by policy. This study uses integrated Household Survey (2009-10) data collected by Federal Bureau of Statistics to examine plausible determinants of poverty status, employing Bivariate models. In general, this study strives to hunt for the household environmental and public utilities factors for poverty status that account for poverty differentials in Pakistan. This study indicates that ownership of assets is a key determinant of poverty. Population occupying a house with more rooms, having better sewerage system, Piped water and toilet type are mostly belonging to the class which is non-poor. Moreover, transitory poor class having defined variables have more probability to come out of poverty line defined. Policy makers might target transitory poor class first to break the vicious circle by providing them better household environments.

Keywords; Poverty Status, Transitory poor, Extreme poor, Public utilities.