The Money-Time Poverty Threshold in at Home Food Production: A Cost Difference Approach

Presenter: Wen You, Virginia Tech

Abstract

Rationale: The two main resources of any household are money and time. Since the seminal work by Vickery (1977), poverty thresholds based solely on money have been known to likely underestimate the number of poor. Vickery’s argument is simple and though it was developed for a general poverty level it applies equally well to food poverty. Food production at home requires two main inputs: money to buy food ingredients and time to process the ingredients into a meal. With sufficient money and time a household can produce enough food to exceed some basic nutritional requirement or food poverty threshold. However, with insufficient money or time a household cannot reach the food poverty threshold.

Objective: The objective of this paper is to adapt the Vickery analysis to measuring mone-time food poverty and to determine how many more individuals would be considered in food poverty if time is considered an important input in addition to money.

Methodology: In this work we adapt the Vickery analysis to measuring money-time food poverty for the U.S. Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), which serves as the foundation for the general poverty calculations in the U.S. We use the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) in conjunction with the Current Population Survey- Food Security Supplement (FSS) to calculate money, time, and money-time thresholds that adhere to the TFP.

Results: The major results from our analysis show that less than 5% of the single headed families reach the time only threshold need for the TFP. Furthermore, the percentage of single headed households classified as food poor more than doubles once time is taken into consideration. From these and other results we consider the implied policy alternatives and implications.While the focus of the paper is empirical with important policy implications, we also make two disciplinary contributions. First, we clarify and provide a stronger theoretical foundation for the approach pursued by Harvey and Mukhopadhyay (2007). Second, we demonstrate a method for generating weekly time expenditures in food production from daily time expenditure estimates. This is an important problem and will likely be encountered in many situations where one wants to use single day time diary data to estimate weekly time use.