The reliability of the household consumption based (Engel curve) methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists. This paper seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a dataset that has educational expenditure information at the individual level and also, by aggregation, at the household level. We find that in the basic education age groups, the discriminatory mechanism in education is via differential enrolment rates for boys and girls. Education expenditure conditional on enrolment is equal for boys and girls. The Engel curve method fails for two reasons. Firstly, it models a single equation for the two stage process. Second, even when we make individual and household level expenditure equations as similar as possible, the household level equation still fails to ‘pick up’ gender bias in about one third of the cases where the individual-level equation shows significant bias. The paper concludes that only individual based data can accurately capture the full extent of gender bias.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Anne Case & Angus Deaton, 2002.
"Consumption, health, gender and poverty,"
Working Papers
197, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies..
[Downloadable!]
Anne Case & Angus Deaton, 2002.
"Consumption, health, gender and poverty,"
Working Papers
261, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing..
[Downloadable!]
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)