Gender and Family Formation in Uttar Pradesh, India
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Date
03/2007Author
Wainwright, Sunila Claire
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Abstract
While modernising influences affect many facets of the lives of millions of
Indian families, there remain deep-rooted socio-cultural practices and traditions
that survive and become engendered in new institutional mechanisms. Labour
market policy is but one example where age-old ethnic affiliations distort governmental efforts and find new ways of expressing themselves.
Efforts over the past decade to slow the rate of population growth, by encouraging adoption of modern family planning methods have failed to tackle son preference and have caused the sex ratios at birth to be worse than at any other
time in the nation's history. This is particularly so in urban India, even among the more educated populace, and it is worsening.
This thesis sets out to assess the way in which such gender considerations
affect family formation decisions, primarily concerning the quantity and quality
of children, with an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the problem. First
we assess how fertility preferences and past child outcomes affect the demand
for family planning and how behaviours associated with the greater autonomy of
women impact upon this process.
The empirical work makes use of data from the latest round of the National
Family Health Survey (NFHS) for India, 1999, for the state of Uttar Pradesh, in a
simultaneous equation framework, in an effort to take account of the joint determination of many of the variables inherent in modelling such dynamic processes
with cross-sectional data. We find that although women's autonomy has been
held up as a means of achieving lower fertility, the two do not necessarily go hand
in hand, unless coupled with the wider participation of women.
Unless the primary social and economic motivations for preferring sons are
tackled and dismantled through legislation and through changes to social attitudes, superficial policies to promote the well-being of women will have little real
impact and may lead to worsening female child outcomes.
One of the policies heralded to achieve the deeper goal of gender equality
has been the promotion of education of female children, who as a group lag well
behind their male counterparts on both literacy and numeracy rates. We thus turn our attention to investigating the way in which household time allocation
decisions are made, focusing on the parental choice of each child's main activity;
to go to school, to work in the home, or in the formal labour market, in an
effort to understand how the household's opportunities and resource constraints,
along with social norms impact such decisions. While some state governments
are offering cash incentives to families to keep their female children in school and
unmarried, significant labour market discrimination against women continues and
constrains the value of this government investment.
Making use of the same NFHS data for Uttar Pradesh, we estimate each
child's trinomial time allocation with competing speci cations and then compare
the results. The standard multinomial logit model is estimated initially but imposes some fairly tight assumptions on behaviour and the resultant data, that
are unlikely to hold in the present application. A Mixed Logit model is then
estimated that is able to bring greater flexibility and descriptive richness than is
possible with the standard Logit model.
Estimation results are compared and con firm the ability of the Mixed Logit
to capture more fully the unobserved heterogeneity inherent in the data and to
allow for correlation in the errors across children of the same family that is not
permitted within the standard logit setup.