Protecting girls from droughts with social safety nets

Jagori Chatterjee and Joshua D. Merfeld

World Development, 2021, vol. 147, issue C

Abstract: This paper revisits the relationship between agricultural productivity shocks and the infant sex ratio in India and investigates how this relationship changes when households have access to government-provided employment opportunities outside of agriculture. When a household’s preference for sons coincides with adverse agricultural productivity shocks, previous research shows that households tend to disproportionately reduce investments (prenatal and postnatal) in their female children. This behavior leads to a relatively more balanced sex ratio in good rainfall years and a more skewed sex ratio (in favor of boys) in low rainfall years. In a deviation from past work, we find evidence of this effect primarily through prenatal channels in modern India. More importantly, we show that a workfare program that decouples both wages and consumption from rainfall attenuates the relationship between rainfall and the infant sex ratio. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we find that the program could have saved at least 0.7 million girls – relative to boys – if the government had implemented it from 2001 to 2005. Suggestive evidence also indicates that the program may have attenuated the positive effect of birth year productivity shocks on girls’ longer-term height-for-age.

Keywords: Sex ratio; Child health; Consumption smoothing; Workfare program; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:147:y:2021:i:c:s0305750x21002394

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105624

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