Deprivation among couples: sharing or unequal division?

In standard poverty and deprivation analyses, all household members are assumed to share equal living conditions. This assumption is, for example, implicit in the AROP rate used at EU level, which is derived from household income. The same assumption has also been made to date for the EU SMD indicator used in the social inclusion target, which is based on nine items collected in the household questionnaire (see Chapter 1 for a definition).
Researchers have been aware for some time that this assumption is rather restrictive (Jenkins, 1991), and could result in a downward bias of estimates of the extent of poverty and deprivation, especially among some subgroups, such as women
and children. Intra-household inequality could mean that some persons in a household are living in poverty or deprivation, even though the household a family below the poverty threshold could
contain someone who is above it.