Perhaps more surprisingly, spending on festivals is an important part of the budget for many extremely poor households. In Udaipur, over the course of the previous year, more than 99 percent of the extremely poor households spent money on a wedding, a funeral, or a religious festival. The median household spent 10 percent of its annual budget on festivals. In South Africa, 90 percent of the households living under $1 per day spent money on festivals. In Pakistan, Indone- sia, and Cote d'Ivoire, more than 50 percent did likewise. Only in some Latin American countries in our samplePanama, Guatemala, Nicaraguaare festivals not a notable part of the yearly expenditure for a significant fraction of the households. However, in the LSMS surveys, unlike the Udaipur survey, people are not asked to account separately for the food that they bought because of a festival. It is therefore probably no accident that the Udaipur spending on festivals is the highest across the surveys. The LSMS numbers would probably have been higher if data on food spending because of festivals had been directly collected in those surveys.

WHY SO MUCH ON THE FESTIVALS?