Inside Beninese Households: How Spouses Manage their Personal Income

Philippe LeMay-Boucher

No 705, CERT Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation, Heriot Watt University

Abstract: This paper draws on an original dataset collected in Benin which features data at the individual level. We first provide evidence that suggest that husband and wife are not pooling their respective incomes and thus are not making expenditure decisions on the basis of one common budget. As we show, husband and wife are secretive and are individually allocating their personal revenue on private and public goods. We look at a simple model that helps us predict determinants of spouses' pattern of consumptions. Our empirical results indicate that spouse's influence, through his/her income, is always smaller than one self's income impact on both personal private and public goods consumption. Moreover, we find that individual private goods consumption is isolated from spouse's income effect which is not the case for public goods consumption.

Keywords: intra-household allocation; gender; Benin (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D12 D13 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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