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United Nations sales no. E.90.III.A.2
We study the validity of experimental methods designed to measure preferences for intra-household resource control among spouses in Ghana and Uganda. We implement two incentivized tasks; (1) a game that measures willingness to pay to control resources, and (2) private and joint dictator games that measure preferences for resource allocation and the extent to which those preferences are reflected in joint decisions. Behavior in the two tasks is correlated, suggesting that they describe similar underlying latent variables. In Uganda the experimental measures are robustly correlated with a range of household survey measures of resource control and women’s empowerment and suggest that simple private dictator games may be as informative as more sophisticated tasks. In Ghana, the experimental measures are not predictive of survey indicators, suggesting that context may be an important element of whether experimental measures are informative.
An unanticipated spike in food prices can increase malnutrition among the poor with lasting consequences, but parents can protect the most vulnerable within the family by distributing scarce food to minimize adverse impacts. To find evidence of this strategy, we use anthropometric and consumption data from Indonesia, collected before and after the 2007/08 food price crisis. Our results indicate that soaring food prices had a significant and uneven impact on growth among children. Using household fixed effects, we find that the negative impact was significantly larger among larger children, as measured by the initial height z-score. We find that children with low height z-scores at the start of the crisis gained ground relative to their peers during the crisis, consistent with food-resource allocations in their favor. The findings remain robust when controlling for possible differential impacts by gender, family size and food producer status. We conclude that the food price crises had negative long-term impacts on children, and that parental behavior protected the most vulnerable. For Indonesian policy makers, our results indicate that safeguarding family food security should be a priority when targeting specific groups of children is difficult.
Three essays on intra-household resource allocation, the cost of illness measure, and immunization policy.
In this last decade, poverty in developing countries remains the most important topic of debate at the international level. The main challenge is how to build policies and programs on a gender perspective approach taking into account gender differences in behavior between male and female at the level of the household. This study is undertaken in a context of two earner partners living in mixed farming systems in Senegal where earnings come primarily from crops and livestock. This book provides substantial research focused on household decision-making regarding resource allocation and consumption. Moreover, it attempts to show empirical findings on the analysis of welfare and well-being through an innovative combination of subjective and objective methods. The research shows how important socioeconomic and cultural factors are in determining earnings from agricultural activities. Important determinants of productivity are related to women’s land access, non-labor income (transfers from migrants), and the wife's access to credit and health care. The research illustrates also that women's bargaining power may be strongly linked to their access to livestock resources, their mobility in purchasing food and medicine and their participation in the management of household finance. Analysis of decision-making regarding expenditures shows that women, more than men, value household goods (related to food, health and schooling expenditures) more than private goods. The results suggest that policies aimed at improving household livelihoods must understand gender differences, obligations and priorities.
Studies of inequality often ignore resource allocation within the household. In doing so they miss an important element of the distribution of welfare that can vary dramatically depending on overall environmental and economic factors. Thus, measures of inequality that ignore intra household allocations are both incomplete and misleading. We discuss determinants of intrahousehold allocation of resources and welfare. We show how the sharing rule, which characterizes the within household allocations, can be identified from data on household consumption and labor supply. We also argue that a measure based on estimates of the sharing rule is is inadequate as an approach that seeks to understand how welfare is distributed in the population because it ignores public goods and the allocation of time to market work, leisure and household production. We discuss a money metric alternative, that fully characterizes the utility level reached by the agent. We then review the current literature on the estimation of the sharing rule based on a number of approaches, including the use of distribution factors as well as preference restrictions.
The welfare state has been under attack for decades, but now more than ever there is a need for strong social protection systems—the best tools we have to combat inequality, support social justice, and even improve economic performance. In this book, José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz bring together distinguished contributors to examine the global variations of social programs and make the case for a redesigned twenty-first-century welfare state. The Welfare State Revisited takes on major debates about social well-being, considering the merits of universal versus targeted policies; responses to market failures; integrating welfare and economic development; and how welfare states around the world have changed since the neoliberal turn. Contributors offer prescriptions for how to respond to the demands generated by demographic changes, the changing role of the family, new features of labor markets, the challenges of aging societies, and technological change. They consider how strengthening or weakening social protection programs affects inequality, suggesting ways to facilitate the spread of effective welfare states throughout the world, especially in developing countries. Presenting new insights into the functions the welfare state can fulfill and how to design a more efficient and more equitable system, The Welfare State Revisited is essential reading on the most discussed issues in social welfare today.