Global evidence on gender gaps and child poverty in consumption

International comparisons of gender inequality or child welfare are typically based on the few measures available at individual levels (such as nutrition proxies or some individual expenditures). Because the complete resource distribution within households is usually not observed, little is known about the relative performance of different countries in terms of gender consumption gaps or child-specific poverty. To move forward, we provide new evidence based on 33 household expenditure surveys from primarily low- and middle-income countries. We estimate a simple model of intra-household resource sharing for each country. Thus, we derive global mappings of gender inequality and child poverty that are consistent and comparable across countries. Average country estimates show a frequent gender gap in consumption, women's share being 18% lower than men's on an international average. Intra-household disparities tend to decrease with living standards, mainly driven by a lower share per child in poorer countries that contributes to aggravate child poverty. This is supported by a symmetric pattern for child nutrition, used as alternative proxy for child welfare, as well as by micro evidence for a subset of countries where individual-level nutrition measures are available. We show that these results are consistent with unfavorable child quantity-quality tradeoffs in poorer countries, exacerbated in some cases by cultural factors.