Intrahousehold Welfare in Rural Ethiopia*
| Published date | 01 August 2009 |
| Date | 01 August 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.2009.00553.x |
| Author | Marcel Fafchamps,Agnes R. Quisumbing,Bereket Kebede |
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©Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford, 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
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OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 71, 4 (2009) 0305-9049
doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0084.2009.00553.x
Intrahousehold Welfare in Rural EthiopiaÅ
Marcel Fafchamps†, Bereket Kebede‡ and
Agnes R. Quisumbing§
†Department of Economics, Oxford University
(e-mail: marcel.fafchamps@economics.ox.ac.uk)
‡School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia (e-mail: b.kebede@uea.ac.uk)
§International Food Policy Research Institute (e-mail: a.quisumbing@cgiar.org)
Abstract
We examine the relationship between bargaining power and intrahousehold welfare
in rural Ethiopia. The relative nutrition of spouses is associated with differences in
cognitive ability, independent income and asset devolution upon divorce. Female
empowerment benefits child nutrition and education. Spouses’ health, leisure and
consumption of assignable goods show no association with differences in bargaining
power. The relative nutrition and health of spouses varies across villages, but not
in ways predicted by anthropological accounts of female empowerment. Bargaining
variables may be weakly associated with intrahousehold welfare because surveyed
households are poor and have little room for disagreement over consumption.
I. Introduction
To explain inequality within households, the theoretical literature has focused on
two main ideas: the functioning of the marriage market; and bargaining within the
household. In a marriage market perspective, prospective spouses negotiate up front
the distribution of future gains from household formation (Becker, 1981). Because of
*The authors have benefitted from comments from the CSAE conference held in Oxford in March 2007
and from seminar participants at Edinburgh, Bristol and Oxford. Data collection was supported by the United
States Agency for International Development, Officeof Women in Development, Grant No. FAO-0100-G-00-
5020-00, ‘Strengthening Development Policy through GenderAnalysis: An Integrated Multicountry Research
Program’. The authors thank the AddisAbaba University survey team for fantastic data collection work, and
John Maluccio, Ellen Payongayong and Oscar Neidecker-Gonzales for assistance in preparing the data for
analysis. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) is gratefully acknowledged. The
work was part of the programme of the ESRC Global Poverty Research Group.
JEL Classification numbers: J16, O15.
568 Bulletin
competition between potential spouses, those who bring more to a union are promised
a higher future utility; if they did not, they would simply marry someone else. Some
empirical evidence supports the view that spouses who bring more assets to a marriage
have higher welfare (e.g. Quisumbing, 2003; Fafchamps and Quisumbing, 2007).
The bargaining framework, in contrast, implicitly assumes that spouses cannot,
at the time of marriage, precommit to a future distribution of utility.1Who gets what
must be negotiated ex-post (e.g. Manser and Brown, 1980; McElroy and Horney,
1981). Intrahousehold inequality is thus predicted to depend on bargaining power,
which in turn depends on threat points. Two main categories of threat points have
been discussed in the literature: those based on the threat of divorce, and those based
on non-cooperation within marriage (Lundberg and Pollak, 1993). The first category
of threat points is influenced by the level of income and welfare that a spouse can
guarantee himself or herself upon divorce, and hence depends on rules regarding the
distribution of assets upon divorce. The second category of threat points is affected
by the level of welfare that spouses can achieve in a non-cooperative marriage. This
level depends on rules regarding the management of household assets during marriage
(e.g. management of household finances, independent sources of income). This theory
predicts wives to be better off if they are more involved in decisions regarding house-
hold production and consumption (McElroy, 1990).
Some evidence has been found to support both views. Using time differences
across US states regarding the introduction of new divorce legislation, Chiappori,
Fortin and Lacroix (2002) for instance shows that intrahousehold inequality is affected
by changes in rules regarding the devolution of assets upon divorce. Using evidence
from the United Kingdom, Lundberg, Pollak and Walse (1997) in contrast show that
a change in the disbursement of children allowance from husband to wife resulted in
a reorganization of consumption expenditures towards goods thought to be preferred
by women.2Pezzini (2005) provides similar evidence based on the introduction of the
contraceptive pill and changes in the legal status of women in Europe. Other factors
are also thought to affect intrahousehold bargaining, notably cognitive ability and
domestic violence.
These theories differ in the factors thought to influence allocation within the
household. But because they can all be represented as shifting intrahousehold welfare
weights, they have one point in common: as long as intrahousehold allocation is effi-
cient, all dimensions of intrahousehold welfare should respond similarly to changes
in welfare weights within the household. This is the so-called sharing rule result due
to Chiappori (1997).
This paper tests these predictions using a purposefully collected data set that
contains information on multiple dimensions of intrahousehold welfare as well as
1Even if prospective spouses cannot explicitly contract on the future distribution of household welfare, they
may seek to influence future bargaining by signing a prenuptial agreement, thereby changing the disposition
of assets upon divorce and hence bargaining power. This point has been noted, for instance, by Lundbergand
Pollak (1993).
2Revisiting the same evidence, Hotchkiss (2005) finds different results and concludes that the data cannot
reject either the income pooling or bargaining models.
©Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford 2009
Intrahousehold welfare in rural Ethiopia 569
detailed data on factors influencing welfare weights. This is a main departure from
the empirical literature that typically focuses on a narrow set of welfare indicators
and bargaining variables at a time. To this effect, a specifically designed household
survey was conducted by the authors. Data were gathered on a variety of welfare
indicators: anthropometric measurements for adults and children; health indicators;
consumption expenditures; education of children; and time budgets to determine the
division of work and leisure within the household. Comprehensive information was
also collected on possible determinants of welfare weights, such as assets and human
capital at marriage, expectations of disposition of assets upon divorce and intrahouse-
hold involvement in production and consumption decisions. To our knowledge, such
a comprehensive analysis of intrahousehold welfare has never been attempted.
We find that intrahousehold allocation of welfare responds to determinants of
welfare weights, but in different ways depending on the welfare indicator used.
Furthermore, the effect of welfare determinants is not always that predicted by theory.
The nutrition differential between spouses is related to the disposition of assets upon
divorce – a point already made by Dercon and Krishnan (2000) using similar data –
but it is also associated with the cognitive ability differential between spouses. The
health differential between spouses also depends positively on their relative cognitive
ability, but it is negatively associated with land brought to marriage. None of the
welfare determinants is found to affect total work time, albeit some have a significant
effect on specific non-work activities. Involvement in household decisions is asso-
ciated with better nutrition and health, but also with less leisure and personal time.
No systematic relationship is found between welfare determinants and expenditures
on specific consumption categories. We do, however, find that children are better fed
and better educated in households in which women have more bargaining power, a
finding that echoes similar findings reported in the literature. We end the paper with
a discussion of possible reasons for these perplexing results.
II. Conceptual framework
To motivate our empirical strategy, we begin by summarizing the key insights from
the marriage market and bargaining models. We begin with a simple version of the
marriage market model, which was pioneered by Becker (1981). Consider Nmen
and women with premarital endowments Am
iand Aj
f, respectively.3The endowment
vector includes physical as well as human capital. The discounted future utility of
being single is V(A) with V>0. For instance, if is the common discount factor and
there is no accumulation, we can write:
V(A)=E[U(Y(Am
i))]
1−,(1)
3Here we abstract from possible strategic bequest considerations by the parents at the time of marriage.
This issue is discussed, for instance, by Fafchamps and Quisumbing (2005a).
©Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Department of Economics, University of Oxford 2009
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