Household Wealth Status: An Asset Based Approach
Wealth has traditionally and commonly been measured using monetary indicators such as income and consumption (Hargreaves et al., 2007). Income is “the amount of money received during a period of time in exchange for labour or services, from the sale of goods or property, or as a profit from financial investments” (O’ Donnell et al., 2008; 70). On the other hand, consumption is “the final use of goods and services, excluding the intermediate use of some goods and services in the production of others” (pp, 70). While there could be some differences in defining these two concepts, the approach to use them as welfare indicators has resulted in the production of social protection policies in various countries including Botswana. However, some researchers have debated the adequacy of the two monetary indicators in capturing status of welfare; hence alternative approaches have been proposed to serve this purpose. It has been observed that despite the findings of assets being the underlying determinants of poverty in the developing world, little attention (safe for human capital proxied by education) is given to them, resulting in the objectives to address only income (and/or expenditure) poverty (Sahn and Stifel, 2003).
