Abstract
This paper examines the effect of the public infrastructure investment on time allocation patterns, focusing on the heterogeneity within females based on their intra-household gender roles in the context of rural Pakistan. It analyzes the association between the public infrastructure investment (access to on-site drinking water) and the time allocation in labor market work (paid and subsistence), household and care work, as well as in learning, leisure, and self-maintenance using Pakistan Time Use Data 2007 with seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) approach. Full sample of females is divided into sub-samples by household type, nuclear and multi-generational households and intra-household gender roles are captured by relationship to the household head (spouse, daughter/grand-daughter, mother, daughter-in-law). The results indicate significant heterogeneity among females explained by their gender roles. Access to water, reallocates the time saved from unpaid work towards subsistence work and self-maintenance with negative effect on learning. While the access to water reduces the household work for a wife in a nuclear household and for the mother-in-law in a multigenerational household, there is no effect on the time spent in household or care work for the daughter-in-law.
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Notes
Includes services and production of goods that are for own use or to sell. Refer to Table 6 in Appendix for detailed definitions.
Refer to Table 6 in Appendix for detailed definition of each activity.
For a comprehensive review see (Schulz & Grunow, 2011).
Since the sample of female headed household is very small, I have excluded them from my analysis.
The detailed definition of each category is given in Table 6 in Appendix.
Includes variables relevant to each reduced-form equation.
Primary and secondary activities are included in the analysis. If in an episode of 30 min, two activities are performed simultaneously, I assign each activity 15 min so that the sum of the day does not exceed 1440 min.
The OLS estimates are report in Table 8 of the Appendix for comparison.
A total of 2,135 households had access to piped water in the dwelling that are excluded. Ilahi and Grimand (2000) indicate that private investment is required to put up pipes and taps for indwelling water supply. Therefore, piped water in dwelling is associated personal preferences and income level. Piped water on yard would be instead a better indicator of what the government is providing to the households.
The Likelihood Ratio is conducted test to check if the sub-samples by the household type are significantly different from the full sample. The results obtained are LR chi2(256) = 42,560.11 and p-value = 0.000 indicating that the subsamples are giving different results than the full sample.
In addition, to control for the accuracy if the time diary data, I control if the household owns a watch/clock.
Refer to Table 7 in appendix spelling out the equation specific variables.
It is the inverse mills ratio obtained by the Heckman-two step model for wage equations for females’ paid work. In the first step, the probit model is estimated for the decision to work with age, education, marital status, number of children age 5 or below, number of girls 6–15 years, household structure(nuclear or multi-generational),Access to transport and market, seasonal variables.
Other papers in literature have followed similar strategy including Ilahi and Grimand (2000). In the first step, the probit model is estimated for the decision to work with age, education, marital status, number of children age 5 or below, number of girls 6–15 years, household structure(nuclear or multi-generational),Access to transport and market. The second stage of the wage equation is modeled as a function of age, age squared, education, access to market and transport and the inverse mills ratio from the first stage.
Same method as described in footnote 15 with addition of seasonal variables included in the first stage.
Refer to Table 6 in Appendix for detailed definition of each activity.
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Malhi, F.N. Going beyond the surface: heterogeneous effect of on-site water access for women. Econ Polit 39, 461–491 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-021-00252-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-021-00252-6