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Female Income and Expenditure on Children: Impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India

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  • Ganita BHUPAL
  • Abdoul G. SAM

Abstract

Touted as the largest public works program in the world, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) was enacted in 2005 with the goal of curtailing rural poverty in India. To ensure gender diversity in program participation, the Indian Government set a target to allocate a third of NREGS employment to women. We study the relationship between female NREGS income and expenditure on children’s goods in rural households of Andhra Pradesh. We use propensity score matching and fixed effects estimation to account for voluntary self-selection into the program and unobserved heterogeneity. Our results indicate that female income from the program prompts a significant increase in the expenditure share of children’s clothing and footwear consumption, and that this positive spur happens on account of a significant increase in the expenditure share for boys. Male NREGS income, on the other hand, has no impact on children expenditure for the considered categories.

Suggested Citation

  • Ganita BHUPAL & Abdoul G. SAM, 2014. "Female Income and Expenditure on Children: Impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India," Applied Econometrics and International Development, Euro-American Association of Economic Development, vol. 14(2).
    • Handle: RePEc:eaa:aeinde:v:14:y:2014:i:2_13
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    Cited by:

    1. Wen Jun & Junaid Waheed & Hadi Hussain & Ihsan Jamil & Denisa Borbášová & Muhammad Khalid Anser, 2020. "Working women and per capita household consumption expenditures; an untouched reality," Zbornik radova Ekonomskog fakulteta u Rijeci/Proceedings of Rijeka Faculty of Economics, University of Rijeka, Faculty of Economics and Business, vol. 38(1), pages 35-69.
    2. Gracious M. Diiro & Abdoul G. Sam & David Kraybill, 2017. "Heterogeneous Effects of Maternal Labor Market Participation on the Nutritional Status of Children: Empirical Evidence from Rural India," Child Indicators Research, Springer;The International Society of Child Indicators (ISCI), vol. 10(3), pages 609-632, September.
    3. Brahma, D. & Mukherjee, D., 2018. "India’S Mid-Day Meal Program And Schooling: An Evaluation Based On Machine Learning," Applied Econometrics and International Development, Euro-American Association of Economic Development, vol. 18(1), pages 141-152.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    NREGS; rural India; female income; matching; panel data.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
    • H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate
    • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models

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