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: of the relative size of the poor versus the extreme poor.

Let us begin with the expenditure patterns of the extreme poor. As one would expect, food would be a major item of expenditure and given their resources and nutritional needs, they would be putting in as much they can on essential food items. Yet, interestingly, as table 2 shows, while food is indeed a major item of expenditure (56-78%), the extreme poor spend non-trivial sums on alcohol and tobacco. For example, expenditure on alcohol and tobacco exceeds that on education for a majority of these countries. This suggests that the extreme poor do have some margin of choice and choose not to exercise it in the form of buying more food. This is consistent with findings from research on nutrition in developing countries that suggest that a 1% increase on overall expenditure translates into about 66% increase in the total food expenditure. Given the presence of significant extent of malnutrition, as measured by the Body Mass Index (BMI) for example, it seems that, as the American writer James Baldwin put it darkly, it is extremely expensive to be poor.

If the poor do not live by bread alone, as seems to be the case, another intriguing finding from some of these surveys is that their self-reported levels of happiness are not particularly low even compared to developed countries. Yet, they report greater incidence of being under stress, and the prime causes for that are health problems and lack of food. In this respect, the poor in developing countries are more similar, than those in developed countries. Perhaps it is not that intriguing, after all. Casual empiricism suggests that if someone is asked, “How are you?” or “How is life?” the answer is more likely to be “good” or “OK” unless one probes deeper.