Search Results (12)

While the status of rural women in the family has undergone changes, rural land transfer has brought about transformations in both rural production and daily life. This paper adopts the perspective of rural land transfer, follows the research track of Marx and Engels’s theory of women, and based on the theoretical research of the changes in the status of modern women in the family, constructs a framework for analyzing the status of women in rural families. Drawing on the data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS2014), this article utilizes OLS (Ordinary Least Square) and ordered logit models to explore the impact of rural land transfer on the status of women in rural households. The study reveals the following findings: Initially, rural land transfer-out improves women’s household decision-making power and enhances the status of women in rural households. The reliability of these results is further confirmed through robustness tests and endogeneity discussions. Secondly, the heterogeneity analysis indicates that the transfer of agricultural land promotes the status of women in rural households in nonmajor grain-producing areas more than women in major grain-producing areas. The reason is that women in major grain-producing areas lack off-farm employment opportunities compared with women in non-major grain-producing areas and the main grain producing areas may have a strong patriarchal cultural atmosphere. Thirdly, the analysis of mechanisms indicates that rural land transfer-out improves the status of women in rural households by augmenting their independent income. Conversely, rural land transfer-in increases women’s private labor and decreases their independent income without promoting their family status. The study sheds light on rural women’s empowerment, the improvement of intra-household bargaining power, and the comprehensive development of rural women. The conclusion of this paper provides a new understanding and some recommendations for us to explore the change of rural women’s status in the family. Full article

This study investigates intrahousehold risk preferences in household portfolio decision-making. Most household finance data are collected at the household level, and it is challenging to come up with an explanation of risk-taking decisions and have a direction on the within-household bargaining mechanisms. We provide these challenging pieces of evidence by applying a Tobit model on panel data taken from waves 2 to 6 of HILDA surveys. Overall, the results indicate that the risk-taking attitude of partners matters in household portfolio allocations. Risk-averse males and their female counterparts invest less in risky assets. Compared with the no-conflict (identical risk preferences) group, male partners with risk-loving behaviour tend to invest more in risky assets. Further, individual risk preferences are sensitive to fluctuations in equity and housing markets in Australia. Taken together, one of the crucial implications of our findings for future research is that household-bargaining models should, perhaps, give more bargaining power to risk-loving males, offering an additional explanation for the determinants of risk-taking behaviour of households. Understanding the risk-taking attitudes of households is important for future work to understand the fraction of households that end up with a negative net worth in recessions or crisis conditions, such as financial crises, pandemics, and wars. Full article

Most studies that explore collective models of intra-household decision-making use economic outcomes such as human capital, earnings, assets, and relative income shares as proxies of the relative distribution of bargaining power. These studies, however, fail to incorporate important measures of control over and management of the economic resources within households. In the current study, a direct measure of financial decision-making power within the household is used to directly assess the distribution of bargaining power. Coarsened exact matching, an identification strategy not yet applied in studies of this nature, is applied to couple-level observational data from South Africa’s longitudinal National Income Dynamics Study. The influence of gender differences in intra-household decision-making on resource allocations to per capita household expenditure is assessed. In the case of greater financial decision-making power in couples being assigned to wives rather than husbands, per capita household expenditure on education increases significantly. The empowerment of women with financial decision-making power therefore holds the promise of realizing the benefits of investments in human capital. Full article

For many family farms, migration is one strategy for reducing poverty and vulnerability to both natural hazards and economic risk. While more men typically migrate to work, the implications of this on the household are inconclusive, especially for the women who remain on the farms. This study employs a gender lens to examine the effects of economically driven migration on household decision-making, farm labor and disaster risk reduction, focusing on two disaster-prone regions with high poverty rates in Vietnam: Dien Bien (Northwest) and Ha Tinh (North Central Coast) provinces. Surveys of 228 households with at least one migrant worker showed a new generation of young male and female migrants, and that men over 30 years of age migrated for longer periods and more frequently than their spouses. Intrahousehold impacts differed according to risk strategies. In areas with a lower-risk coping strategy (Dien Bien), seasonal jobs coincided with periods of less intense farming activities. During the absence of male family members, women temporarily made more domestic decisions. In areas with a higher-risk adaptation strategy (Ha Tinh), farming was planned for longer absences; thus decisions remained largely unchanged. Remittances invested into agriculture contributed to shortening the recovery period after disasters and, in some cases, diversifying farming systems. The migrant’s absence was offset by relatives and neighbors as essential labor reserves. New resilient farming systems need to be disaster proof, gender-sensitive and free up labor. Full article

Milk, provided it is safe, provides important micronutrients that can combat hidden hunger (undernutrition). Many peri-urban poor people in Tanzania and Kenya use informal markets to purchase milk in order to provide nutritional benefits to their families. Household decision-making processes play an influential role in how much milk to buy and how it is treated. This exploratory qualitative study, conducted in peri-urban Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, examined how access to milk, control over milk handling and safety, and intra-household milk distribution are affected by gender dynamics and by changes in milk availability and price. Focus group discussions with 48 women and 45 men and key informant interviews with 8 men and 8 women, all of whom were parents or caretakers to young children, were conducted. The results indicate that gender roles in milk purchase and handling vary. Generally, providing enough milk is a man’s responsibility, whilst a woman is expected to ensure a nutritious diet. Yet women’s limited decision-making power regarding milk purchase can restrict their ability to provide sufficient milk. Interventions to promote safe milk consumption need to consider gender norms, strengthen intra-household collaborative decision-making, include men in nutrition programming, and increase women’s control over food expenditures. Full article

An epidemiological model, which describes the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 under specific consideration of the incubation period including the population with subclinical infections and being infective is presented. The COVID-19 epidemic in Greece was explored through a Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis framework, and the optimal values for the parameters that determined the transmission dynamics could be obtained before, during, and after the interventions to control the epidemic. The dynamic change of the fraction of asymptomatic individuals was shown. The analysis of the modelling results at the intra-annual climatic scale allowed for in depth investigation of the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 and the significance and relative importance of the model parameters. Moreover, the analysis at this scale incorporated the exploration of the forecast horizon and its variability. Three discrete peaks were found in the transmission rates throughout the investigated period (15 February–15 December 2020). Two of them corresponded to the timing of the spring and autumn epidemic waves while the third one occurred in mid-summer, implying that relaxation of social distancing and increased mobility may have a strong effect on rekindling the epidemic dynamics offsetting positive effects from factors such as decreased household crowding and increased environmental ultraviolet radiation. In addition, the epidemiological state was found to constitute a significant indicator of the forecast reliability horizon, spanning from as low as few days to more than four weeks. Embedding the model in an ensemble framework may extend the predictability horizon. Therefore, it may contribute to the accuracy of health risk assessment and inform public health decision making of more efficient control measures. Full article

Women’s empowerment in terms of both involvements in employment activities and with decision-making about household activities is the most evident factors that can affect the nutritional and health status of their children. This paper investigates the effect of women’s empowerment (WE) on children’s nutritional (CN) status in Pakistan. The Pakistan demographic health survey (PDHS 2012-13) cross-sectional data was used to analyze the impacts of WE on child malnutrition. The composite index of anthropometric failure (CIAF) was used as a dependent variable to measure the children’s nutritional status, and the wealth index household size. The number of children in a house and indicators of women empowerment, which included the mother’s education, employment status, and the household decision-making, were used as the independent variables. The method of binary logistic regression with marginal effects was used for the empirical analysis of the results. The results of the study showed the indicators of women’s empowerment, such as the education of the mother and employment status had a negative relationship with child malnutrition. Women’s decision-making about the visits to family, which is an indicator of WE, had an insignificant effect on CN. Similarly, socioeconomic status, which included the wealth index, also caused a reduction in child malnutrition. In addition, an increase in household size had a positive and significant relation to child malnutrition. Women are the primary caretakers of children in the household, and their intra-household dynamics affect the well-being of individuals. The empowerment of women acts as a means to enhance children’s nutritional status, which causes important developmental outcomes. Full article

A systematic and precise understanding of urban socio-economic spatial inequalities in developing regions is needed to address global sustainability goals. At the intra-urban scale, access to detailed databases (i.e., a census) is often a difficult exercise. Geolocated surveys such as the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are a rich alternative source of such information but can be challenging to interpolate at such a fine scale due to their spatial displacement, survey design and the lack of very high-resolution (VHR) predictor variables in these regions. In this paper, we employ satellite-derived VHR land-use/land-cover (LULC) datasets and couple them with the DHS Wealth Index (WI), a robust household wealth indicator, in order to provide city-scale wealth maps. We undertake several modelling approaches using a random forest regressor as the underlying algorithm and predict in several geographic administrative scales. We validate against an exhaustive census database available for the city of Dakar, Senegal. Our results show that the WI was modelled to a satisfactory degree when compared against census data even at very fine resolutions. These findings might assist local authorities and stakeholders in rigorous evidence-based decision making and facilitate the allocation of resources towards the most disadvantaged populations. Good practices for further developments are discussed with the aim of upscaling these findings at the global scale. Full article

Rift Valley fever (RVF) is a zoonotic disease of great public health and economic importance transmitted by mosquitoes. The main method of preventing the disease is vaccination of susceptible livestock before outbreaks occur. Studies on RVF vaccines have focused on the production processes, safety, and efficacy standards but those on uptake and adoption levels are rare. This study sought to understand the barriers faced by men and women farmers in the uptake of livestock vaccines to inform strategies for optimizing the use of vaccines against RVF in East Africa. The cross-sectional qualitative study utilized the pairwise ranking technique in sex disaggregated focus group discussions to identify and rank these barriers. Results indicate that men and women farmers experience barriers to vaccine uptake differentially. The barriers include the direct and indirect cost of vaccines, distances to vaccination points, availability of vaccination crushes, intra-household decision making processes and availability of information on vaccination campaigns. The study concludes that vaccine provision does not guarantee uptake at the community level. Hence, these barriers should be considered while designing vaccination strategies to enhance community uptake because vaccine uptake is a complex process which requires buy-in from men and women farmers, veterinary departments, county/district and national governments, and vaccine producers. Full article

There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures development according to quantitatively defined parameters and does not allow for local variation. We argue that the extent to which the positive or negative aspects of the SDGs prevail depends on the monitoring system’s ability to account for multiple and intersecting inequalities. The need for sub-nationally (urban) representative indicators poses an additional methodological challenge—especially in cities with intra-urban inequalities related to socio-spatial variations across neighbourhoods. This paper investigates the extent to which the SDG indicators’ representativeness could be affected by inequalities. It does so by proposing a conceptual framing for understanding the relation between inequalities and SDG monitoring, which is then applied to analyse the current methodological proposals for the indicator framework of the “urban SDG,” Goal 11. The outcome is a call for (1) a more explicit attention to intra-urban inequalities, (2) the development of a methodological approach to “recalibrate” the city-level indicators to account for the degree of intra-urban inequalities, and (3) an alignment between methodologies and data practices applied for monitoring SDG 11 and the extent of the underlying inequalities within the city. This would enable an informed decision regarding the trade-off in indicator representativeness between conventional data sources, such as censuses and household surveys, and emerging methods, such as participatory geospatial methods and citizen-generated data practices. Full article

We examine the impact of social distance in dictator game giving. The study is conducted in a field setting with high stakes (two days’ wages). The sample is a representative sample from eleven low-income Mexican villages. Subjects make multiple dictator decisions simultaneously, in a comparative dictator game. We show the relationship between social distance and giving using several family members, a member of the same village, and a stranger from a different village. Dictator giving shows substantial variation across recipient types and varies directly with social distance. We find higher giving towards family members than towards community members and strangers. Furthermore, our results indicate that giving to community members and to strangers is not different. In light of our results, it is important to consider the impact of social distance on inter- and intra-household transfers in policy interventions that alleviate poverty, e.g., conditional transfers. Full article

This paper proposes a methodology to incorporate bivariate models in numerical computations of counterfactual distributions. The proposal is to extend the works of Machado and Mata (2005) and Melly (2005) using the grid method to generate pairs of random variables. This contribution allows incorporating the effect of intra-household decision making in counterfactual decompositions of changes in income distribution. An application using data from five latin american countries shows that this approach substantially improves the goodness of fit to the empirical distribution. However, the exercise of decomposition is less conclusive about the performance of the method, which essentially depends on the sample size and the accuracy of the regression model. Full article