Girl Power in Agricultural Production: How Much Does it Yield? A Case-Study on the Dairy Sector in India

Astrid Sneyers and Anneleen Vandeplas

LICOS Discussion Papers from LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven

Abstract: It is often argued that women have an important role to play in fostering sustainable and inclusive development. Several empirical studies indeed find a correlation between intra-household bargaining power and spending on children’s nutrition, health and education. The general perception of the impact of gender on agricultural productivity is far less favorable. As a result of constrained access to input markets, output markets, and land markets, female-headed households are usually found to be less productive in agriculture than male-headed households. This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of female intra-household decision-making power on dairy productivity in India, based on evidence from a household-level dataset which was collected in 2008 in 50 villages spread over 5 districts in Andhra Pradesh, a state in the South of India. The results of our analysis suggest that equal, if not higher, productivity is achieved in households where a woman, rather than a man, is the primary decision-maker over production-related decisions. While caution is due in drawing overly strong conclusions, and more research is needed to corroborate these findings, our results provide a more nuanced view on the impact of gender on agricultural productivity than the one which is usually put forward in the literature.

Keywords: agricultural productivity; dairy sector; gender; female decision-making power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://feb.kuleuven.be/drc/licos/publications/dp/DP_341

Related works:
Working Paper: Girl Power in Agricultural Production: How Much Does it Yield? A Case-Study on the Dairy Sector in India (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lic:licosd:34113

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LICOS Discussion Papers from LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance, KU Leuven Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().