A household can be defined as one person living alone, or a group of people living at the same address, with common housekeeping and sharing either some living space or at least one meal a day. Budgets are the arrangements made to balance income and expenditure over a given period of time. When the two words are used together, as in the term household budgets, the result is a topic that has recently been the focus of vigorous critical debate, in which anthropologists, sociologists, and some economists have collected new empirical data to mount an attack on a key concept in traditional economics. These debates have been concerned with the definition of the term household and with the extent to which the household is the ...