Poverty is multi-dimensional in nature and depends on interactions of various socio-economic factors. Several demographic and
health factors can shape up the economic status of a household, and theory suggests that the ability of a household to earn a given
level of income can depend on the characteristics internal to the household. While most of the studies done on poverty
determinants rely on the income, expenditure and consumption data, the data used in this study comes from the Demographic and
Health Surveys, (DHS). The principal component analysis is used to create an asset index which gives the social economic status
(SES) of each household. A Logistic regression is estimated based on this data with the SES (that is poor and non-poor) as the
dependent variable and a set of demographic variables as the explanatory variables. The results presented in this paper suggest that
the DHS data can be used to determine the correlates of poverty.