Public Goods Access and Juvenile Sex Ratios in Rural India: Evidence from the 1991 and 2001 Village Census Data

Anil B. Deolalikar (), Rana Hasan and Rohini Somanathan
Additional contact information
Anil B. Deolalikar: University of California, Riverside

No 167, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: We use village level data from the 1991 and 2001 Indian Censuses to examine how the availability of health facilities and safe drinking water at the village level affect juvenile sex ratios. In addition to controlling for village fixed effects in our estimating equation of the juvenile sex ratio, we also allow villages to be heterogeneous in terms of how their juvenile sex ratios respond to the availability of health facilities and safe drinking water. A key result we obtain is that although the presence of public health facilities does not exert a positive, significant effect on juvenile sex ratios on average, they do so in villages where the problem of discrimination against girls is most acute, i.e., in villages at the 0.10 and 0.25 quantiles of the conditional juvenile sex ratio distribution. Thus public policy can be an effective tool in improving gender balance in cases where it is most needed.

Keywords: discrimination; gender balance; health facilities; safe drinking water; sex ratios (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J16 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2009-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/public-goods-acce ... 991-and-2001-village Full text (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: PUBLIC GOODS ACCESS AND JUVENILE SEX RATIOS IN RURAL INDIA: EVIDENCE FROM THE 1991 AND 2001 VILLAGE CENSUS DATA (2009)
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:ris:adbewp:0167

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().