Public pre-schooling and maternal labour force participation in rural India

Monica Jain

Oxford Development Studies, 2016, vol. 44, issue 2, 246-263

Abstract: Mothers from poor families in India have a compelling need to work, but childcare for their young children is a constraint. Public day-care implicit in pre-schooling is provided by India’s largest child development programme, which also provides other services, including supplementary feeding, immunisation and health check-ups. Using logit, covariate matching and village-fixed effects methods, I find that in rural India a mother whose child is receiving any of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) services intensely is 15% more likely to work. Among the various pathways, it seems that this effect is driven mainly by the day-care implicit in pre-schooling for their children. There is also some evidence of child health benefits through immunisation and health check-ups received at the ICDS centre which affect mothers’ likelihood to work.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13600818.2015.1082998 (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:oxdevs:v:44:y:2016:i:2:p:246-263

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CODS20

DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2015.1082998

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Development Studies is currently edited by Jo Boyce and Frances Stewart

More articles in Oxford Development Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().