This article explores intrahousehold dietary diversity allocation within pastoralist households in eastern Africa. We estimate income elasticities of dietary diversity for demographic cohorts allowing asymmetric behavior depending on household circumstances. We find that household heads disproportionately bear the nutritional burden when household income is below mean, while other cohorts disproportionately enjoy the nutritional gains when it is above mean. The commonly assumed symmetric framework masks this intrahousehold behavior and produces biased elasticity estimates. Stochastic dominance tests show adult daughters as better‐off than other household members in their dietary diversity, sons as worse off, and little difference between male heads and their wives.
In this paper we explore the nutrition-income relationship for pastoralist households in East Africa. Previous estimates of income elasticities of nutritional demand have ranged from zero to close to unity. However, these estimates are always based on nutrition's relationship with total income. One possible reason for this wide range is that nutrition may respond differently to different sources of income if, for example, agents engage in "mental accounting", the practice of treating distinct income sources as not fully fungible. Estimating income-nutrition elasticities with total income may mask these differential responses and result in very different income elasticity estimates depending on which income source changes. Using dietary diversity as a measure of dietary quality, we find that differential dietary responses across income sources do exist among the pastoralist households studied. Possible explanations for this result are market failures for certain commodities, intrahousehold bargaining and mental accounting. Tests show that neither market failures nor intrahousehold bargaining fully account for the differential responses observed. Thus it appears that mental accounting indeed plays some part in explaining the nutritional patterns evident in this sample.
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