Gender Bias and the Intrahousehold Distribution of Resources: Evidence from African Nuclear Households in South Africaâ€

Olivier Bargain, Prudence Kwenda and Miracle Ntuli

Journal of African Economies, 2018, vol. 27, issue 2, 201-226

Abstract: This paper applies recent developments in collective model estimation to elicit the allocation of resources in African families in South Africa. We use the 2010/11 South African Income and Expenditure Survey as it contains exclusive goods, i.e., goods consumed by specific household members, to be used for identification. We rely on a consumption model that accounts for (potentially unequal) resource sharing and jointness in consumption (generating economies of scale). Results indicate that men tend to receive more than women (even if imprecise estimates make the difference statistically insignificant), leading to sharp gender differences in terms of poverty. Ignoring economies of scale leads to an overestimation of poverty among adult men and women living with others. Children’s resource shares are in line with international standards but household resources are relatively low among African families so that ignoring intrahousehold allocation leads to an underestimation of child poverty.

Keywords: collective model; sharing rule; economies of scale; individual poverty; South Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejx022 (application/pdf)
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:oup:jafrec:v:27:y:2018:i:2:p:201-226.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().