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Outcome analysis difficulties
Q: If households from a particular wealth group have different sources of cash income, how is it possible to do an outcome analysis for a problem of cash income?
A: It is true that this can create problems. However, these may not always be quite as serious as might be expected. While there may be many individual income-generating activities in an urban setting, the poor generally obtain cash income from two main categories of activity; casual labor and small-scale business or petty trade. And income from the one is often related to the other – in poorer areas a good proportion of the cash income from small-scale business/trade may be generated locally from people doing casual labor, so a downturn in casual labor will also affect the incomes of small businesses and traders. However, where this is not the case, then an alternative is to run a ‘worst-case’ scenario, looking at the effect of the ‘problem’ on households that depend entirely on the affected source of cash income. While this is less useful than an analysis for the whole wealth group (because the number of people affected may not be known), it can still shed important light on the possible impacts of a particular problem.
