Intrahousehold Health Care Financing Strategy and the Gender Gap: Empirical Evidence from India

Abay Asfaw, Stephan Klasen and Francesca Lamanna
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Francesca Lamanna: World Bank

No 177, Ibero America Institute for Econ. Research (IAI) Discussion Papers from Ibero-America Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: The “missing women” dilemma in India has sparked interest in investigating gender discrimination in the provision of health care in the country. No studies, however, have directly examined this discrimination in relation to household behavior in health care financing. We hypothesize that households who face tight budget constraints are more likely to spend their meager resources on hospitalization of boys rather than girls. We use the 60th Indian National Sample Survey and a multinomial logit model to test this hypothesis and to shed some light on this important but overlooked issue. The results reveal that while the gap in the probability of boys’ and girls’ hospitalization and usage of household income and savings is relatively small, the gender gap in the probability of hospitalization and usage of scarce resources is very high. Ceteris paribus, the probability of boys to be hospitalized by financing from relatively scarce sources such as borrowing, sale of assets, help from friends, etc., is much higher than that of girls. Moreover, the results indicate that the gender gap deepens as we move from the richest to poorest households.

Keywords: gender discrimination; health care finance; hospitalization; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J71 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2008-10-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-hea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:got:iaidps:177

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