Remittances and Household Expenditures on Education in Ghana's Northern Region: Why Gender Matters

Lynda Pickbourn

Feminist Economics, 2016, vol. 22, issue 3, 74-100

Abstract: Studies of the impact of migrant remittances on receiving households assume that these households act as a unit in receiving remittances and making decisions about their use. Thus, many of these studies use the gender of the household head as a key control variable. This study questions this assumption, using original qualitative and quantitative data on rural--urban migration of women in Ghana to show that gendered social norms of household provisioning influence the intrahousehold flow of remittances. Regression results indicate that migrant women are more likely to send remittances to other women, creating female-centered networks of remittance flows even within male-headed households. The implications of this for intrahousehold resource allocation are explored through an analysis of the impact of the gender of the remitter and recipient on education expenditure. The results show that regardless of the gender of the household head, households in which women are the primary recipient of remittances spend more than twice as much on education as households in which men are the primary recipient.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2015.1107681 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:femeco:v:22:y:2016:i:3:p:74-100

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2015.1107681

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().