Abstract

Wealth has traditionally and commonly been measured using monetary indicators such as income and consumption Hargreaves et al 2007 Income is the amount of money received during a period of time in exchange for labour or services from the sale of goods or property or as a profit from financial investments O Donnell et al 2008 70 On the other hand consumption is the final use of goods and services excluding the intermediate use of some goods and services in the production of others pp 70 While there could be some differences in defining these two concepts the approach to use them as welfare indicators has resulted in the production of social protection policies in various countries including Botswana However some researchers have debated the adequacy of the two monetary indicators in capturing status of welfare hence alternative approaches have been proposed to serve this purpose It has been observed that despite the findings of assets being the underlying determinants of poverty in the developing world little attention safe for human capital proxied by education is given to them resulting in the objectives to address only income and or expenditure poverty Sahn and Stifel 2003