Gender Differentiated Impacts of Commodity Price Shocks on Households’ Consumption Behavior: A Natural Experiment

Khondoker Mottaleb () and Olaf Erenstein

No 275915, 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Using information collected from more than 29,000 households by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, the present study examines the gender-differentiated impacts of the commodity price hikes in 2008-09 on food and non-food consumption behavior based on the sex of the household head. Applying the difference-indifference estimation procedure in a natural experiment setting, this study demonstrates that, in general, commodity price hikes more adversely affected the female-headed households. In 2010, they were forced to reduce expenditures on food and non-food items, and particularly cereal, non-cereal, health and education expenditures, more than the male-headed households. However, this study clearly shows that the impacts of commodity price hikes were lower on the female-headed households headed by educated females and those who owned larger pieces of land, received remittances, and allocated labor to non-farm sectors. These sub-sets were not affected by the commodity price shocks in 2010 compared to 2000. The findings strongly suggest that the provision of both human and physical capital is instrumental in developing countries to empower female headed-households to withstand economic shocks.

Keywords: Consumer/Household Economics; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2018-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae18:275915

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.275915

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