The Domestic Transition: Progress Towards Decent Living of Households in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Abstract

Over the past decades, households have gradually increased their ownership of goods that make life easier and more comfortable, such as furniture, TVs, kitchen supplies, phones, (motor)bikes, and cars. We refer to this development, in which households move from having few durable assets to having many, as the domestic transition. In this study, we argue that this transition reflects the rise towards what could be called a decent standard of living. While this standard has been reached decades ago in affluent societies, the domestic transition has hardly started in the poorest countries. The current paper aims to assess the status of the domestic transition at the level of subnational regions within low- and middle-income countries and to examine how variations in its pace relate to these regions' socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural characteristics. Our analyses reveal that the domestic transition in these regions follows an S-shaped curve and that the speed of the transition is faster in wealthier, more educated, and urbanised regions with smaller dependent populations.