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How Does Women’s Decision-Making Power Affect Budget Share, Nutrition and Education in Pakistan?

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Abstract

Understanding the effects of power distribution, particularly women’s decision making, on human development is important. This study used a set of direct measures of decision-making power from the Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement Survey and examined the relationship between women’s decision-making power and the food budget share, nutrition and child schooling. It found that in Pakistan, the relationship between women’s decision-making power and nutrition was not linear and varied depending on rural or urban residence. There was no clear evidence that higher women’s decision-making power would lead to better nutrition availability in Pakistan, but overall households were more likely to consume less grain and more vegetables. When women had higher decision-making power, children, particularly rural girls, were more likely to be enrolled in school.

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Notes

  1. The male head of households were interviewed by a male enumerator separately.

  2. If a husband makes the decision by himself, he is considered to have decision-making power equal to 1; if a husband “jointly makes the decision,” he is considered to have decision-making power equal to 0.5; if a husband was not involved at all in the decision making, he is considered to have decision-making power equal to 0.

  3. The t test results are available upon request.

  4. The slight U shape at the left tail is due to the outliers of log per capita expenditure.

  5. Individual school enrollment is defined based on the question “Did… enroll in school /institution last year?” It is defined as 1 if the answer is “yes” and 0 if the answer is “no.”.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the invaluable comments provided by Dominique Van De Walle and Carolina Sanchez on the earlier version. This paper also greatly benefited from discussions with Mansoora Rashid, Songqing Jing, Andrea Vermehren, Iftikhar Malik, Cem Mete, Dhushyanth Raju, participants of the South Asia Human Development Knowledge Exchange Group Seminar, the Gender Action Plan Conference and all Pakistan Social Protection team members. I thank Ning Ma for her excellent assistance in preparing the data, Jing Zhang for helping with tables and invaluable comments received from two anonymous reviewers and the editor Professor Elizabeth Dolan. As usual, the findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, to its affiliated organizations, or to members of its Board of Executive Directors or the countries they represent. This work was supported by the Gender Action Plan Trust Fund and the Trust Fund for environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (TFESSD) through the World Bank.

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    Xiaohui Hou

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Correspondence to Xiaohui Hou.

Appendix

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See Table 7.

Table 7 Summary statistics for household sample
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Hou, X. How Does Women’s Decision-Making Power Affect Budget Share, Nutrition and Education in Pakistan?. J Fam Econ Iss 37, 115–131 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-015-9439-2

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