© 1989 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank
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Looking for Boy-Girl Discrimination in Household Expenditure Data
The author is a professor of public affairs and of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and is a consultant to the Population and Human Resources Department of the World Bank. The author thanks Dwayne Benjamin who provided for excellent research assistance. He is grateful to him and to members of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University for helpful comments. This is a revised and shortened version of Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper 39, "The Allocation of Goods within the Household: Adults, Children, and Gender", June 1987. The results from Thailand were not included in the working paper.
The ability to test for discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls is hampered by a lack of data on intrahousehold distribution. The analysis presented here allows inferences about intrahousehold allocation to be made from household-level expenditure data. For a given level of income, families with children will spend less on adult goods in order to purchase children's goods. If household purchasing favors boys over girls, smaller expenditures on adult goods would be made by families with boys as compared with those with girls. A method for determining "adult" goods is described, and the procedure for detecting gender bias is applied to data from Côte d'lvoire and Thailand. The data show no evidence of discrimination between boys and girls in Côte d'lvoire, and a small and statistically insignificant bias in favor of boys in Thailand.
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