Disability and Poverty in Developing Countries : A Snapshot from the World Health Survey

The association between disability and poverty has been noted intuitively, although there is little systematic evidence to support this claim, mainly due to a lack of quality data on disability. This paper attempts to fill a knowledge gap on disability and poverty in developing countries by using a unique data set, the World Health Survey, which has comparable measures of disability and economic indicators for working age population in 15 developing countries. Disability is significantly associated with higher multidimensional poverty in most of the developing countries under study. At the individual level, in most of the countries included in the study, persons with disabilities have lower educational attainment and experience lower employment rates than persons without disabilities. At the household level, in most countries households with disabilities are not worse off when their well-being is measured by mean non-health PCE. However, in most countries, households with disabilities have a significantly lower mean asset index and report spending a higher proportion of their expenditure on health care