Women’s Empowerment and Social Household Spending in Fragile States: Evidence from Chad
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Date
2022-02
Authors
MABALI, Aristide
KINDA, Somlanare Romuald
MALLAYE, Douzounet
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
African Economic Research Consortium
Abstract
State fragility in Chad has been narrowly associated with insecurity due to a long cycle
of violent conflict and recurrent droughts, leading to low social development. In this
paper, we have investigated the impact of women’s empowerment on household
social expenditures using data from the Chadian household consumption and informal
sector survey carried out in 2011, and Propensity Score Matching as empirical model.
The social expenditures used as outcome variables are education, health and food.
We find that social expenditures are higher when a household is headed by a woman
than when it is headed by a man with similar observed characteristics. In particular,
differences between female-headed households and male-headed households are
higher in food expenditures after controlling for observed characteristics (covariates).
The results also show that there is a composition effect in household expenditure.
While female-headed households spend their incomes in social sectors (health, food
and education), those headed by men spend for temptation goods (alcohol and
leisure). These results hold when we control both model specification and common
support hypothesis. Our findings provide decision makers with economic policy tools
to promote the social development focusing on women’s empowerment.