IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/19590.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Gender Bias Among Children in India in their Diet and Immunisation Against Disease

Author

Listed:
  • Borooah, Vani

Abstract

This paper conducts an econometric analysis of data for a sample of over 4000 children in India, between the ages of 1-2 years of age, with a view to studying two aspects of the neglect of children: their likelihood of being immunised against disease and their likelihood of receiving a nutritious diet. The starting hypothesis, consistent with an universal interest in gender issues, was that girls were more likely to be neglected than boys. The analysis confirmed this hypothesis. In respect of vaccinations, the likelihood of girls being fully vaccinated, after controlling for other variables, was five percentage points lower than that for boys. In respect of receiving a nutritious diet, the treatment of girls depended very much on whether or not their mothers were literate: there was no gender discrimination between children of literate mothers; on the other hand, when the mother was illiterate, girls were five percentage points less likely to be well-fed relative to their brothers and the presence of a literate father did little to dent this gender gap. But the analysis also pointed to a broader conclusion which was that all children in India suffered from sharper, but less publicised, forms of disadvantage than that engendered solely by gender. These were the consequences which stemmed from children being born to illiterate mothers and being brought up in the more impoverished parts of India.

Suggested Citation

  • Borooah, Vani, 2004. "Gender Bias Among Children in India in their Diet and Immunisation Against Disease," MPRA Paper 19590, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:19590
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/19590/1/MPRA_paper_19590.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Geeta Gandhi Kingdon & Jeemol Unni, 2001. "Education and Women's Labour Market Outcomes in India," Education Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(2), pages 173-195.
    2. Oaxaca, Ronald, 1973. "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 14(3), pages 693-709, October.
    3. Vani Borooah, 2000. "The Welfare of Children in Central India: Econometric Analysis and Policy Simulation," Oxford Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(3), pages 263-287.
    4. Borooah, Vani, 2003. "Births, Infants and Children: an Econometric Portrait of Women and Children in India," MPRA Paper 19620, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Klasen, Stephan, 1994. ""Missing women" reconsidered," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 22(7), pages 1061-1071, July.
    6. Foster, Andrew D & Rosenzweig, Mark R, 1996. "Technical Change and Human-Capital Returns and Investments: Evidence from the Green Revolution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(4), pages 931-953, September.
    7. Behrman, Jere R & Wolfe, Barbara L, 1984. "The Socioeconomic Impact of Schooling in a Developing Country," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 66(2), pages 296-303, May.
    8. Gibson, John, 2001. "Literacy and Intrahousehold Externalities," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 155-166, January.
    9. Lavy, Victor & Strauss, John & Thomas, Duncan & de Vreyer, Philippe, 1996. "Quality of health care, survival and health outcomes in Ghana," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3), pages 333-357, June.
    10. Caldwell, John C., 1993. "Health transition: The cultural, social and behavioural determinants of health in the Third World," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 125-135, January.
    11. Cowell, Frank A & Jenkins, Stephen P, 1995. "How Much Inequality Can We Explain? A Methodology and an Application to the United States," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 105(429), pages 421-430, March.
    12. Basu, Kaushik & Foster, James E, 1998. "On Measuring Literacy," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 108(451), pages 1733-1749, November.
    13. Ravallion, Martin & Wodon, Quentin, 2000. "Does Child Labour Displace Schooling? Evidence on Behavioural Responses to an Enrollment Subsidy," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 110(462), pages 158-175, March.
    14. Nielsen, Helena Skyt, 1998. "Discrimination and detailed decomposition in a logit model," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 115-120, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Vani Borooah & Sriya Iyer, 2005. "Vidya, Veda, and Varna: The influence of religion and caste on education in rural India," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(8), pages 1369-1404.
    2. Vani K. Borooah, 2002. "The Role of Maternal Literacy in Reducing the Risk of Child Malnutrition in India," ICER Working Papers 31-2002, ICER - International Centre for Economic Research.
    3. Borooah, Vani, 2009. "Maternal Literacy and Child Malnutrition in India," MPRA Paper 19833, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Borooah, Vani K., 2004. "On the incidence of diarrhoea among young Indian children," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 119-138, March.
    5. Basu, Kaushik & Narayan, Ambar & Ravallion, Martin, 2001. "Is literacy shared within households? Theory and evidence for Bangladesh," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(6), pages 649-665, December.
    6. Basu, Kaushik & Narayan, Ambar & Ravallion, Martin, 1999. "Is knowledge shared within households?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2261, The World Bank.
    7. Borooah, Vani K., 2005. "The height-for-age of Indian children," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 3(1), pages 45-65, March.
    8. Lindelow, Magnus, 2004. "Health care decisions as a family matter - intra-household education externalities and the utilization of health services," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3324, The World Bank.
    9. Husain, Zakir & Dutta, Mousumi & Ghosh, Sriparna, 2011. "Contraceptive use among illiterate women in India: does proximate illiteracy matter?," MPRA Paper 30790, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Francesco Burchi, 2012. "Whose education affects a child’s nutritional status? From parents' to household's education," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 27(23), pages 681-704.
    11. Sabina Alkire & Maria Emma Santos, 2010. "Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing Countries," Human Development Research Papers (2009 to present) HDRP-2010-11, Human Development Report Office (HDRO), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
    12. Powers, Daniel A. & Yun, Myeong-Su, 2009. "Multivariate Decomposition for Hazard Rate Models," IZA Discussion Papers 3971, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Zelda Okatch & Abu Siddique & Anu Rammohan, 2013. "Determinants of Income Inequality in Botswana," Economics Discussion / Working Papers 13-15, The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics.
    14. Woojin Chung & Monica Das Gupta, 2007. "The Decline of Son Preference in South Korea: The Roles of Development and Public Policy," Population and Development Review, The Population Council, Inc., vol. 33(4), pages 757-783, December.
    15. Mona Said & Fatma El-Hamidi, 2008. "Taking Technical Education Seriously in MENA: Determinants, Labor Market Implications and Policy Lessons," Working Papers 450, Economic Research Forum, revised 09 Jan 2008.
    16. Deshpande, Ashwini & Goel, Deepti & Khanna, Shantanu, 2018. "Bad Karma or Discrimination? Male–Female Wage Gaps Among Salaried Workers in India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 331-344.
    17. Albert López-Ibor, Rocío & Escot Mangas, Lorenzo & Fernández Cornejo, José Andrés, 2010. "La predisposición de las estudiantes universitarias a auto-limitarse profesionalmente en el futuro por razones de conciliación/The Predisposition of Feminine University Students to Professional Self-L," Estudios de Economia Aplicada, Estudios de Economia Aplicada, vol. 28, pages 203(32á)-20, Abril.
    18. Bönke Timm & Schröder Carsten, 2011. "Poverty in Germany – Statistical Inference and Decomposition," Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), De Gruyter, vol. 231(2), pages 178-209, April.
    19. Maddox, Bryan, 2007. "Worlds Apart? Ethnographic Reflections on "Effective Literacy" and Intrahousehold Externalities," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 532-541, March.
    20. Dutta, Indranil, 2004. "Generalized measures of literacy," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 69-80, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Children; gender; diet; vaccination; India;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:19590. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.