Does women’s participation in agricultural technology adoption decisions affect the adoption of climate‐smart agriculture? Insights from Indo‐Gangetic Plains of India

Increased participation of women in the agricultural technology adoption decision by farm households is one of the key indicators of gender empowerment in the agricultural sector. This study examines whether women’s participation in the household decision to adopt agricultural technology affects the adoption of climate‐smart agriculture (CSA), using data collected from 1,267 farm households from two Indian states of Bihar and Haryana. When we considered the sex of the household head (using a dummy variable for male‐headed vs female‐headed household) as a basis of analyzing the role of gender in the adoption of CSA, we found that women in Haryana had no role in the adoption of CSA. On the contrary, when we considered women’s participation in technology adoption decisions as a basis of gender analysis, we found that women’s participation in technology adoption decisions in Haryana is much higher as compared to Bihar. Consequently, the likelihood to adopt CSA is higher in Haryana than in Bihar. We also found that wealth, training, and access to extension and market positively influenced CSA adoption. Qualitative analysis shows that women farmers prioritize family food security rather than farm income, and therefore, they are more likely to focus on CSA to ensure food security.     

INTRA-HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATIONS IN RURAL ETHIOPIA: A DEMAND SYSTEMS APPROACH

This article examines the effects of price, income and demographic changes on intra-household allocations by integrating the outlay equivalent method into the Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS). Tests for separability in preferences and "demographic separability" are conducted. Longitudinal data to control for household heterogeneity are used. Results indicate that Ethiopian rural households respond to price, income and demographic changes in a more complicated manner than usually presumed; price, income and demographic changes do not have similar effects on all household members. Income changes affect men and boys more than women and girls, but variations in prices affect women and boys more than men and girls. Even though outlay equivalent ratios on average indicate discrimination against girls, girls are more protected from fluctuations in income and prices compared to boys. The results highlight limitations of previous studies that ignore direct income and price effects.     

Saving and the intra-household distribution of income: an empirical investigation

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between household saving and the distribution of income within the household. Various theoretical reasons why the level of saving might depend on the latter are given. Some of these can be rationalized within the usual “unitary” model of household decision but others recognize explicitly that different members of the household may have different preferences about how much to save.Particular attention is paid to saving for retirement since the facts that wives are, on average, younger than their husbands and women have longer life expectancies means that wives typically anticipate a longer retirement period than their husbands. Thus wives may prefer to save more for retirement than their husbands.The empirical analysis uses a sample of Canadian households from five Family Expenditure Surveys. These surveys include measures of financial saving as well saving in retirement accounts. After accounting for many of the other influences on saving (for example: age, household composition, occupation and education levels but not household income) we find some effects of the intra-household distribution of income on savings rates. The parameter estimates suggest that the household saving rate decreases with the share of the wife in household income.     

Tests of Income Pooling in Household Decisions

Using the Progresa data from Mexico, we investigate intrahousehold decision making using a variety of outcomes. We exploit both the experimental nature and the (short) panel dimension of the data to measure the impact of exogenous changes in the intrahousehold distribution of resources on household decisions. We test for global pooling of resources within households, which would correspond to the unitary model of household decision making. We also exploit a set of questions about power and the decision making process in the household to investigate aspects of strategic interactions between household members. Our findings confirm previous rejections of income pooling. We also cannot reject that the wife's relative income share is a significant determinant of the wife's decision making power in the household, with a higher share of income associated with more decision making power. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: J12, D13, H31.     

On the determinants of household debt maturity choice

This article jointly analyses a behavioural and a cultural concept to explain household debt portfolio choice. The behavioural approach explores the role of time preferences on household debt maturity in a theoretical model and a numerical analysis. We derive a positive relationship between the long-term discount factor δ and the optimal maturity of household loans. The cultural approach examines whether national culture is a reasonable predictor for household debt maturity. We show that culture is an important factor for households’ borrowing decisions and has even more predictive power than time preferences. Countries with higher scores on the Hofstede dimension of long-term orientation tend to have shorter household debt maturity. Time preferences incur a primarily mediating role, because the effect of national culture on the borrowing decision is reduced, as the long-term discount factor δ increases.     

Anthropometric failure and persistence of poverty in rural India

Recent studies have drawn attention to the high prevalence of stunting among children in rural India. In fact, these estimates point to more pervasive deprivation than conventional measures of poverty based on income or consumption expenditure shortfalls imply. Since stunting reflects cumulative nutritional and health deprivation, it is likely to persist despite higher incomes. With a view to shedding some new light on this issue, an analysis of the determinants of stunting is carried out, based on a recent all‐India survey of rural households. While income matters, other factors acting independently of it matter too. These include household size, whether household head is male, caste affiliation, mother’s age at marriage, mother’s age, age composition of children, male–female wage differences, hygiene and sanitation facilities, and prices of food items. So, while higher incomes will help mitigate stunting, careful attention must also be given to enhancing women’s autonomy through more remunerative employment opportunities for them, enabling households to improve hygiene and sanitation facilities, and facilitating more competitive local markets for food.     

The surprisingly low importance of income uncertainty for precaution

While it is common to use income uncertainty to explain household saving decisions, there is much disagreement about the importance of precautionary saving. This paper suggests that income uncertainty is not an important motive for saving, although households do have other precautionary reasons to save. Using a question from the Survey of Consumer Finances that asks how much households want for precautionary purposes, this paper shows that expressed household preferences, and liquid savings, are much lower than predicted by standard modeling assumptions. Households rarely list unemployment as a reason to save. Perceived income uncertainty does not affect liquid savings or precautionary preferences. Neither does being in an occupation with higher income volatility. Instead, households seem very concerned with expenditure shocks.     

Is there a retirement consumption puzzle in Japan? Evidence from a household panel dataset spanning several years

Using a unique long-run panel of Japanese households, this paper examines the changes in consumption at retirement (‘the retirement-consumption puzzle’). Our analysis shows that households’ expenditure does decline after the retirement of the household head and that changes in household composition at retirement cannot fully account for this decline. Changes in life-style/preferences after retirement also do not appear to explain a salient feature of the expenditure decline, namely, the strong correlation between the magnitudes of the expenditure decline and the income decline upon retirement. On the other hand, our finding that the expenditure decline is larger for households with smaller savings and/or that experienced a large unexpected income decline is broadly consistent with the standard LC/PIH augmented with unexpected shocks, while it does not rule out the possibility that there is a relatively small subset of households that are myopic and lack sufficient saving discipline.     

An econometric model of tenure choice and demand for housing as a joint decision

This paper models a household's choice of tenure and demand for housing services as a joint decision imposing the restriction that both discrete and continuous decisions are derived from a single preference ordering. The utility index for households is the translog form of the reciprocal indirect utility function allowing for random preferences. Each household chooses between the two main tenures, the owner-occupied and subsidised rental sectors, but households may be rationed in either or both of these sectors and refused admission, in which case they are assumed to enter the third sector, uncontrolled rental. The model is estimated on UK data for 5895 households.     

Accounting for Preference and Scale Heterogeneity in Establishing Whether it Matters Who is Interviewed to Reveal Household Automobile Purchase Preferences

The choice of automobile purchases in households often involves participation of more than one household member, each of which exerts some degree of influence on the final choice outcome. The influence of more than one agent has been recognised for many years, and yet the majority of automobile choice studies develop choice models as if a single agent is involved in the preference revelation process. What is not clear is whether it makes any substantive difference in preference revelation according to who is interviewed in a household. Using a generalised mixed logit framework that accounts for preference and scale heterogeneity, we estimate a series of models to investigate whether there are significant differences between the preferences of each individual in a household when assessed in isolation from other household members, as well as their joint preferences when expressing their preferences through a group choice task. The context is choosing amongst petrol, diesel and hybrid fuelled vehicles (associated with specific levels of fuel efficiency and engine capacity) when faced with a mix of vehicle prices, fuel prices, fixed annual registration fees, annual emission surcharges and vehicle kilometre emission surcharges. Using a stated choice experiment, we find that sampling a single individual as a representative of the household’s preferences is less appropriate than utilising preference information from the relevant group of decision makers in the household.     

Household Debt and Financial Constraints in Australia

Over the past decade, household debt (as a share of household income) has reached historically high levels. This has raised concerns about whether, as a result of the rise in debt, households are now more financially ‘fragile'. Using household survey data, a logit model is constructed to examine the relationship between the probability of being financially constrained and the economic and demographic characteristics of households in Australia. We find that the probability of a household being constrained is significantly affected by demographic and economic variables such as age, home ownership, weekly household income, and the share of income going to repayments on mortgage debt. Comparing survey results across time, it appears that the overall proportion of households that are financially constrained has fallen or, at worst, remained unchanged between 1994 and 2001. Much of the rise in debt appears to have been due to unconstrained households taking on more debt. As such, the rise in the aggregate debt to income ratio associated with owner‐occupier mortgages appears to be the result of voluntary household choice and not to be associated with an increase in household financial distress.     

Moderate prosperity,an adaptation of the middle class concept to a Malagasy rural area: the case of Itasy

In order to adapt the controversial sociological concept of ‘Middle Class’ to an African agriculture-based economy, exemplified by Madagascar, we propose the concept of Moderate Prosperity. As a case study, we use detailed data from 508 households in the 2008 Itasy Observatory. We stratify them using four distinguishing socio-economic factors: household income quintile, head of household’s education level, income structure and land tenure. We describe four Moderate Prosperity clusters that reflect the agro-economic diversity of the Itasy region: a vulnerable group of agriculturally diversified households in the third income quintile with locally issued land title; an emerging group of skilled, polyculture farmers belonging to both the lowest and highest quintiles; a traditional group of uneducated rice farmers in the fourth quintile with traditional land ownership; and an upper group of educated livestock farmers, non-agricultural independents and workers, belonging to the top income quintile with locally issued land title.     

New evidence on taxes and portfolio choice

Identifying the effect of differential taxation on portfolio allocation requires exogenous variation in marginal tax rates. Marginal tax rates vary with income, but income surely affects portfolio choice directly. In systems of individual taxation – like Canada's – couples with the same household income can face different effective tax rates on capital income when labor income is distributed differently within households. Using this source of variation we find portfolio responses to taxation among more affluent households. The estimated effects are statistically significant but economically modest. In a “placebo” test, using data from the U.S. (which has joint taxation), we find no effect of the intra-household distribution of labor income on portfolios.     

中国居民家庭的收入变动及其对长期平等的影响

本文利用“中国经济、人口、营养和健康调查”1 989— 1 997年期间 4期家庭收入和家长特征的模块数据 (paneldata) ,用时间依赖定义收入变动 ,度量了全体家庭和分4种类型的家庭在上世纪 80年末至 90年后半期的收入变动。发现在总体收入分配中 ,高比例持续贫困的发生比较分散 ,并不固定在哪一类型的家庭上。平均而言 ,农村家庭的持续贫困比例稍高。与此相反 ,持续高收入的家庭集中在城市、郊区和城镇 ,农村的富裕家庭变动大 ,收入不稳定。分组家庭之间 ,农村家庭的收入变动最大。分组家庭内部 ,家长为中年和壮年人的家庭人收入景况较好 ,富裕老人家庭能否保持富裕在农村和在其它分组差别很大。总体而言 ,我国居民家庭收入分配的变动在这一时期减慢 ;收入变动在所有4个时期内都有利于分配的平等 ,2 0世纪 90年代中期后在农村和城镇家庭的作用大幅减弱 ,但对改善城市家庭的平等分配作用增强。     

Debunking the myth about China’s low consumption

This article argues that the generally held belief about China’s consumption being too low is a myth based on the misapplied Keynesian theory and inaccurate official statistics. The article identifies three sources of underestimation of household consumption by China’s official statistics: housing consumption is grossly underestimated, private consumption paid by companies is not accounted for, and most importantly, high income households are significantly underrepresented in the household surveys on which household consumption statistics are based. A re-estimation suggests that the rate of China’s consumption is more than 60% of GDP, not the official 48–49%, and it is comparable to the level experienced by the high income East Asian economies during their rapid growing years.     

Household formation rules,fertility and female labour supply: Evidence from post-communist countries

This paper explains how household formation rules affect the fertility and labour supply of women in the Former Soviet Union and neighbouring countries. Women who bear a male first child in countries dominated by traditional, patrilocal households are shown to have substantially lower subsequent fertility from those whose first child is female. Where households are generally nuclear, male first borns do not reduce subsequent fertility. Middle-aged women in more patrilocal contexts often work less if their first child is male, despite reduced fertility and being more likely to reside with a daughter-in-law. In more nuclear contexts, they tend to work more. These findings suggest that household formation rules are strongly related both to women’s demand for sons and to the direction of intergenerational transfers.     

Rural development in the digital age: Does information and communication technology adoption contribute to credit access and income growth in rural China?

Information and communication technology (ICT) plays an important role in rural livelihoods and household well-being. Therefore, this study examines the impact of ICT adoption on farmers' decisions to access credit and the joint effects of ICT adoption and access to credit on household income using 2016 China Labour-force Dynamics Survey data. Both recursive bivariate probit model and a selectivity-corrected ordinary least square regression model are employed for the analysis. The results show that ICT adoption increases the probability of access to credit by 12.8% in rural China and empowers rural women and farm households in relatively less-developed regions to access credit. ICT adoption and access to credit affect household income differently. ICT adoption significantly increases household income, while access to credit significantly reduces it, primarily because farmers do not use the acquired credit to invest in income-generating farm and off-farm business activities. ICT adoption has the largest positive impact on household income at the highest 90th quantile. Our findings suggest that improving rural ICT infrastructure to enhance farmers' ICT adoption and developing ICT-based financial products to enable households to access sufficient funds can improve rural household welfare.     

Non-farm Income and Consumption Expenditures in Rural Bangladesh: Empirical Evidence from Multilevel Regression Modelling

This study examines the effects of non-farm income on household consumption expenditures in rural Bangladesh. A two-stage endogenous treatment effect model is built on data from a nationally representative Household Income Expenditure Survey (HIES) 2010 to control selection bias. The HIES follows a hierarchical data structure because the survey is based on two-stage stratified sampling. A multilevel mixed-effects linear regression model is used to capture the unobserved heterogeneity between clusters (PSUs) along with revealing important factors. Results reveal that non-farm income has a significant positive effect on household’s consumption expenditures and non-farm income recipient households spend about 29% more than their counterparts. In addition, higher level of per capita income, education, smaller family size and lower dependency ratio are found to be more effective in increasing consumption expenditures of rural households. Significant cluster-level variations are observed in the analyses. This study recommends that non-farm income generating activities should be encouraged among rural households as this would raise their consumption expenditures and hence, improve welfare and living standards among them.

     

中国农村家庭脆弱性的测量与分解

在理论层面上,本文在效用理论基础上对脆弱性进行了定义并对其分解以反映消费的不平等性和波动性。在实证分析层面上,本文使用CFPS(Chinese Family Panel Studies)数据对中国农村家庭脆弱性进行量化与分解。量化结果表明多数农村家庭是脆弱的;分解结果发现相对于村间不平等,村内不平等是脆弱性的主要组成部分。家庭脆弱性及五个分解部分对家庭特征集合变量的OLS回归结果表明:增加农村家庭收入是降低其脆弱性最有效的手段;提高劳动力平均受教育水平能够有效降低家庭脆弱性,但大学教育支出会显著提高家庭的脆弱性水平,这较好地解释了目前出现的农村籍高中生弃考大学这一现象;新型农村合作医疗和社会保险能有效降低农村家庭脆弱性;社会资本、更大的家庭规模和更高的劳动力占比有利于降低家庭脆弱性,这能较好地解释中国农村家庭频繁的送礼活动以及倾向于组建大家庭的现象。     

Does 401(k) eligibility increase saving?: Evidence from propensity score subclassification

By comparing 401(k) eligible and ineligible households’ wealth, this paper estimates that, on average, about one half of 401(k) balances represent new private savings, and about one quarter of 401(k) balances represent new national savings. Responses to eligibility vary considerably, however, with households who normally save the most largely contributing funds they would have saved anyway. This paper improves on previous research by: (1) employing propensity score subclassification to control more completely for observed household characteristics, (2) controlling for more household characteristics, including several correlated with unobserved savings preferences, and (3) adjusting the observed measure of households’ wealth to reduce measurement error.