Resumen de Female income and expenditure on children:: impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India
Touted as the largest public works program in the world, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) was enacted in 2005 with the goal of curtailing rural poverty in India. To ensure gender diversity in program participation, the Indian Government set a target to allocate a third of NREGS employment to women. We study the relationship between femaleNREGS income and expenditure on children’s goods in rural households of Andhra Pradesh. We use propensity score matching and fixed effects estimation to account for voluntary self-selection into the program and unobserved heterogeneity. Our results indicate that female income from the program prompts a significant increase in the expenditure share of children’s clothing and footwear consumption, and that this positive spur happens on account of a significant increase in the expenditure share for boys. Male NREGS income, on the other hand, has no impact on children expenditure for the considered categories.
