Does maternal employment augment spending for children's health care? a test from Haryana, India
Berman, P.; Zeitlin, J.; Roy, P.; Khumtakar, S.
Health Transition Review the Cultural Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health 7(2): 187-204
1997
ISSN/ISBN: 1036-4005 PMID: 10176378 DOI: 10.2307/40652278Document Number: 271122
This study looks at the effect of maternal employment on household resources allocated to young children during 1006 episodes of illness reported from a sample of 276 low-income households in Haryana state, India. Hypotheses tested were that 1) increased household income will increase health expenditures for children; 2) spending patterns for child health would differ in households with and without employed mothers; 3) the percentage of total household earnings contributed by women would positively influence spending on child health; and 4) women's labor force participation increases the opportunity cost of women's time and, thus, the "shadow" cost of child health care. The report opens with a description of the overall research design, the types of women's employment available in the study area, and the children's illness and treatment patterns. Women were classified into a typology of work groups based on quantitative and qualitative data on women's work over a year (1989-90). The hypotheses were tested using a reduced-form approach derived from household economics in which a simple utility-maximizing framework considers household selection between health care services and other goods to be subject to an income constraint. The results confirm the first two hypotheses, but it was found that the women's work variables failed to alter the determinants of health spending. Possible explanations include the fact that 1) maternal earnings from the available types of employment are not an empowering element in the lives of these rural women and/or 2) sociocultural factors restrict the empowerment related to female employment. Maternal earnings benefit children by increasing household earnings, but there was no evidence that maternal earnings preferentially benefitted children in this study.