Impact of intrahousehold cooperation on household welfare and household public goods provision

Published: 20 September 2018| Version 1 | DOI: 10.17632/ywdr8kt26p.1
Contributors:
Els Lecoutere, Bjorn Van Campenhout

Description

The contribution of this article is providing evidence of the impact of intrahousehold cooperation on household welfare and household public goods provision in agricultural households in East Africa. While one of the main empirical challenges is that intrahousehold cooperation and household welfare are likely to be endogenous, we make use of the random encouragement for an intervention intended to stimulate intrahousehold cooperation to estimate the effect on household welfare and household public goods provision that is mediated through cooperation. The random encouragement fulfils the conditions to be used as an instrument to estimate the causal effect of the otherwise potentially endogenous treatment variable cooperation. We demonstrate that improved cooperation, as measured by jointly controlling a substantial share of the coffee income and livestock, joint decision-making over cash crops and adoption of sustainable intensification practices, and the joint management of the main household food and cash crops, has substantial positive effects on household income per capita and on the likelihood of household food security. The likelihood of investing in agricultural production, an important public good in these households, is greatly increased by improved cooperation as well.

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Categories

Development Studies, Household Behavior, Gender, Intrahousehold Allocation

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