Why Do African Households Give Hospitality to Relatives?

This empirical paper proposes to explain why African households often provide long-term hospitality to relatives. We use a budget and consumption survey carried out in Gabon in 1994, examine two types of hypotheses, and propose a two-step procedure to discriminate between them. We address the question whether the number of guests and the hospitality decision mainly come from the head of household, in which case the whole income of the nuclear households will determine the number of guests, or if they come rather from the extended family, in which case only the part of income that relatives are able to observe will matter. We thus regress nuclear household income on variables that relatives could use to evaluate it. In a second step, we estimate both the probability of having a guest and the number of guests, introducing predicted income and the residual of first step among the regressors. Predicted income is interpreted as the income that the relatives attribute to the nuclear household, while the residual is the unobservable part of the nuclear households income. We show that only the observable part of household income has an effect on the probability of having a guest and on the number of them. Regressions are conducted both for male and female adults and for young guests, and show that conclusions differ to some extent depending on the sex and the age of the guests.