Standard of Living

Go Back

This section describes and discusses the main results on standard of living. The entire set of results is available in the Standard of Living Results Tables. This section presents results for nine indicators related to the standard of living for adults and their households. They inform CRPD Article 28 on “Adequate standard of living and social protection” and include the share of adults in households with electricity (SDG 7.1.1); using clean fuel for cooking (SDG 7.1.2); with adequate housing; who own assets; who own a cell phone (SDG 5.b.1); who are food insecure (SDG 2.1.2), who have recently experienced a shock (e.g. flooding, drought); who receive social protection (SDG 1.3.1).

Results

Table 9.1 presents an overview of the results across countries for electricity, using clean fuel for cooking, with adequate housing; who own assets; who own a cell phone. It shows a disability gap in close to all countries for assets and cell phone ownership and in more than half of countries for electricity, clean fuel and adequate housing. The mean and median difference across functional difficulty status is under five percentage points for all indicators except for cell phone ownership at seven percentage points.

Table 9.2 shows the share of food insecure adults in 12 countries. The share of food insecure adults is the proportion of adults living in households that experiences food insecurity. In all countries except Afghanistan, persons with functional difficulties have a significantly higher share of food insecure adults. In the 11 countries with a food insecurity disability gap, the gap is large with a median at 10 percentage points. For instance, in Namibia, the share of food insecure adults is at 35% for persons with any functional difficulty compared to 25% for persons with no difficulty.

Table 9.3 shows the share of adults in households who experienced a shock (e.g. flooding, drought) in nine countries. In all countries, persons with functional difficulties have a significantly higher share of adults who experienced a recent shock. The gap is sizeable between a low of five percentage points in Malawi and a high of nine percentage points in Uganda.

In 13 countries with detailed household expenditures data, Table 9.4 compares the share of total expenditures dedicated to health out of pocket expenditures for households with and without an adult with a functional difficulty. In all but two countries, households with any functional difficulty dedicate a significantly higher share of expenditures to health. For instance, in Bangladesh and West Bank Gaza, households with any functional difficulty dedicate 50% more of their total expenditures to health costs than households with no difficulty.

Table 9.5 shows the share of adults in households with social protection. The share of adults with social protection is the share of adults in households who have received social protection benefits in the past year or currently receive them (e.g. cash benefits, in kind transfers). In 10 out of 12 countries, the share of adults with social protection is higher among persons with functional difficulties.  In these 10 countries, the difference is at six percentage points or below, except for Bangladesh and Namibia with differences of 10 and 25 percentage points respectively.

Table 9.1: Difference In Adequate Standard Of Living Indicators Between People With No Difficulty And Any Difficulty Across Countries (Percentage Points)

Table 9.2: Adults In Food Insecure Households (%)

Table 9.3: Adults Who Experienced Shocks Recently (%)

Table 9.4: Household Health Expenditures Out Of Total Consumption Expenditures (%)

Table 9.5: Adults In Households Receiving Social Protection (%)

Discussion

This section presented results on nine indicators related to standard of living. A disability gap, i.e. a disadvantage for persons with functional difficulties compared to persons with no functional difficulty, is consistently found across countries in terms of food insecurity, exposure to shocks, asset ownership and larger health expenditures. For a majority of countries, there is a disability gap for electricity, clean fuel and adequate housing and adults with functional difficulties tend to receive social protection more often than persons with no difficulty.

Access to social protection programs, even disability-targeted ones, has been shown to be restricted by a variety of barriers, including unclear eligibility criteria (Banks et al 2017). It needs to be the subject of policy and research attention to ensure access and investigate their adequacy in alleviating poverty.

Most of the countries under study in this report are LMICs where, due to the variability of income over time and the difficulty to measure it for workers doing informal work, poverty is often measured through assets/living conditions or consumption expenditures. Several studies show that households with disabilities have fewer assets and worse living conditions compared to other households (World Bank 2009) or a higher prevalence in lower asset quintiles (Bernabe-Ortiz et al 2017; Hosseinpoor et al 2013; Kuper et al 2016). This result however, has not been consistent and several studies find no significant association (Trani and Loeb 2010) or varied results across countries (Mitra et al 2013). This report contributes to this literature by covering many countries and using consistent disability and standard of living measures across countries. The disability gap was consistent across countries for asset ownership and found for a majority of countries for electricity, clean fuel, adequate housing. This adds to a body of evidence documenting persons with disabilities being more often materially worse off.

Many studies use consumption expenditures instead of income to measure poverty. Several country studies have found that households with disabilities have lower expenditures than households without (e.g. Mont & Cuong (2011) (Vietnam)). Results have been more mixed in cross-country studies where disability in adulthood is associated with a higher probability of being in poverty in some countries but not in others (Filmer 2008; Mitra et al 2013).

However, using consumption expenditures is problematic to assess the well-being of households with disabilities, as they may reflect additional expenditures associated with a disability, which may boost household expenditures, while at the same time making it difficult to acquire assets or have adequate living conditions. This report shows a consistent disability gap in asset ownership as well as higher health care out of pocket costs experienced by households with functional difficulties, consistent with a growing literature on the extra costs of living of households with disabilities (Banks et al 2021; Hanass-Hancok et al 2017; Mitra et al 2017). Poverty statistics based on consumption expenditures such as the $1.90 a day do not seem adequate to capture the situation of persons with disabilities given potential extra costs of living associated with disability.  Instead, measures based on assets and living conditions may be more appropriate.