EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Unintended consequences of farm input subsidies: women’s contraceptive usage and knock-on effects on children

Martin Limbikani Mwale () and Tony Mwenda Kamninga ()
Additional contact information
Martin Limbikani Mwale: University of Malawi
Tony Mwenda Kamninga: ODI

Journal of Population Research, 2024, vol. 41, issue 3, No 6, 28 pages

Abstract: Abstract Sub-Saharan Africa’s countries adopted farm input subsidies, with a twin goal of bolstering food security and reducing poverty. Many scholars evaluate the subsidies against these intended impacts, while ignoring the potential unintended consequences. In this paper, we take advantage of a rare combination of information on both contraceptive usage and a subsidy program, from Malawi’s 2020 multiple indicator cluster survey, to investigate whether Malawi’s farm input subsidy program (FISP) affected women’s contraceptive usage. Using the instrumental variables method, we find that women that lived in FISP households increased contraceptives usage. This is in line with the hypothesis that the women aimed to prevent pregnancy, and hence dedicate uninterrupted time to farming, complementing the FISP. More of women’s time in farming could imply less of their time in domestic chores. We, therefore, further investigated whether children, in the same households, increased participation in the domestic chores, to take up roles left by the farming women. We find that this is the case. These findings therefore highlight the importance of understanding both the intended and unintended consequences of welfare programmes to ensure that the impacts of such programmes are not over-or underestimated.

Keywords: Women; Contraceptive usage; Children; Domestic chores; Subsidies; Malawi; C54; D04; I38; Q120 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12546-024-09337-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:joprea:v:41:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s12546-024-09337-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... tudies/journal/12546

DOI: 10.1007/s12546-024-09337-y

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Research is currently edited by Santosh Jatrana, Dharmalingam Arunachalam, Aude Bernard, Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Ann Evans, Michael Haan, Brian Houle, Trude Lappegård and Gordon Carmichael

More articles in Journal of Population Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:joprea:v:41:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s12546-024-09337-y