The economic effects of public and private transfers on elderly households in India: Implications for social welfare policies

Abstract
There has not been any study in India to understand the relationship between public and private inter-household transfers and the impact of such transfers on the livings standards of the older households. Part of the problem is the lack of adequate data; data sets containing both private transfer and public transfer are scarce. Therefore, the key contributions of this paper would be to take into account endogeneity of income and resource flows into the household; investigate the relationship between public and private transfers and assess the economic effects of transfers on the households. The study uses data from the survey titled ‘Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE)’ carried out by WHO and International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in 2007 in six states of India namely Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Karnataka. The sample consists of 12, 198 households with at least one person aged 50 years and above. An appropriate econometric technique would be adopted to address the endogeneity of public transfer and income when estimating the determinants of private transfer. For the estimation of the incidence of poverty, household equivalent income that reflects total income and the number of children and adults in the household would be calculated by using OECD scale.