Evidence from Cross-tabulation Analyses

This section shows that simple cross-tabulations can reveal useful information on the relationship between family size and different indicators of family welfare.

Table 3 [ PDF 74.9KB | 1 page ] provides the mean per capita income, per capita expenditure and savings of households by size of household. It is clear from the table that households are not able to maintain income per capita, expenditure per capita and savings per capita as household size increase. The mean per capita income declines from 18,429 for a fourmember household to 8,935 for a 9 or more-member households. Mean consumption per capita also declines from 15,480 to 7,699 from a four-member to a 9 or moremember household. Finally, the mean savings per capita declines from 2,950 for a fourmember household to 1,236 for a 9 or more-member household.

Looking at the changes in human capital expenditures, actual school attendance and incidence of child labor as family size increase provides even more revealing information. Not only does expenditure per student decline but also actual school attendance declines and child labor increases as household size increase.

Table 4 [ PDF 45.2KB | 1 page ] shows that as household size increases the education expenditure per student declines. In addition, the expenditure per sick or injured member, as well as the health expenditure per capita declines as household size increase. For a four-member household education expenditure per student is 1,787 while for a nine or more-member household this is 682. Expenditure per sick member also declines from 1,464 for a fourmember household to 756 in a nine-member household. Finally, health expenditure per capita declines from 438 for a four-member household to 150 for a nine or more-member household. Since expenditure per member is a good measure of the extent of investment, these figures reveal that families are spreading resources more thinly as family size increase. This has obvious deleterious effects on human capital outcomes.

Going beyond the education expenditure to actual school attendance by household size provides similar revealing results, albeit in a more subdued manner. The absence of drastic changes is easily explained by the well-known attitude of Filipino parents to always keep their children in school as long as possible.⁶ This is the main explanation of the relatively high attendance rates one finds in the Philippines given its per capita income. In addition, in looking at the attendance table (Table 5 [ PDF 45.9KB | 1 page ]) one must consider the fact that the smaller households may also contain young starting out families with no school-age children or old families with children no longer present. This partly explains the increasing attendance from household size of one to about 4 or 5 members.⁷ With these considerations in mind, one can see that in a four-member household, 67.9 % of the school-age members 6 to 24 years old attend school while in a nine or more-member household the proportion is 65.6% (Table 5 [ PDF 45.9KB | 1 page ]). Similar patterns are also obtained if one examines the school attendance in the different age groups corresponding to the elementary, secondary and college levels.

Combining this particular information and the one in the previous table means that even though lesser number of students are attending school with higher family size, the expenditure per student can still not be maintained as family size increase. This reveals the kind of difficulties large households are facing in trying to keep their children in school trying to keep a revered Filipino tradition.

Finally, the incidence of child labor by size of household also generates revealing information. The proportion of working children under 15 years old rises with the family size (Table 6 [ PDF 43.1KB | 1 page ]). For a family of four, only 3.3% of children less than 15 years are working while 4.6% are working in a family of nine-or more. This pattern is, of course, repeated in the 5-9 and 10-14 age groups. This explains somewhat the decline in school attendance in the previous table as family size increase. Of course, it can be argued that students can still attend school even if working. But this can only be done at the expense of leisure or more frequent absences from classes. Both have negative effects on the welfare of the child.

Cross-tabulation analyses, of course, suffer from not being able to control for other variables that are known to affect the relationship of family size and the various indicators of family welfare. We, therefore, turn to multivariate analyses in the next section.

Download this Discussion Paper [ PDF 187.8KB| 24 pages ].

Comment(s)

There are [5] comment(s) for this entry. Post a comment.

1. Edgar
   (posted 01 August 2007 / 03:06:59 AM)
   
   I haven't really exhaustively read the discussion paper, just breezed through, so I might sound unfair, but I am now old enough to be highly distrustful of kneejerk reactions and conventional wisdom that suggest population is largely causative of family poverty. Has there not been enough research that large scale asset reform in highly skewed income distributive countries such as the Philippines is needed to industrialize a population and as a side effect put more females in the smokestack workforce? And this industrialization will lead to more families involuntarily spacing births? Come on, address land ownership first and produce indigenous jobs, rather than depending on migrant employment to create a surplus. Be more critical of theories that population is a major contributory factor to poverty.
2. krisjoy
   (posted 22 March 2007 / 03:27:52 PM)
   
   It's not enough to just be aware that we are poor. Since the government posted ambitious poverty reduction targets, then the average 'juan' will continue to think rice is special for more years. I think what we need is to work as a nation, achieving realistic marks for developments in agriculture, land reform, population planning, security issues, among others. I am young and I am earning; however, I feel very poor seeing that many of my fellowmen do not eat rice and that the tax I religiously pay does not get to projects.
3. MARIONNE
   (posted 06 March 2007 / 10:38:21 AM)
   
   poverty is a very hard opponent. if we want to have even a wee bit of development in our poor country, the government must see to it that poverty is lessened.
   tnx...
4. Junior
   (posted 01 March 2007 / 09:05:08 PM)
   
   In our country corruption is the number one cause of poverty thanks.
5. john
   (posted 11 July 2006 / 05:43:07 PM)
   
   Yes! It is evident here in the philippines
   because, as we can see now it is our problem ....thats all.