2012 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
Intra-household allocation of foods in a matriarch county Laos
| Project/Area Number |
22530243
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Applied economics
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| Research Institution | International University of Japan |
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Principal Investigator |
MANGYO Eiji 国際大学, 国際関係学研究科, 教授 (30421233)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2010 – 2012
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| Keywords | 家計内資源配分 / 家母長制 / ラオス / 食料 |
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| Research Abstract |
Many previous studies show that females have lower levels of schooling and self-reported health than males in developing countries. Some previous studies attribute lower levels of human resources for females than for males to the social system of patriarch where boys will become household heads after maturity and marriage and reside with their own parents while girls will marry out to their husbands’ families after marriage and reside with their parents in law. Under this system of patriarch, parents have incentive to invest in son’s human resources rather than in daughter’s. Laos is one of rare countries in Asia in the sense that it practices matriarch in many parts of its country. It is interesting to analyze the intra-household allocation of foods in Laos, given the influential hypothesis that the social system of patriarch is one driver of discrimination against females in terms of human-resource investments. I find in this present study that food consumption is more elastic for males than for females with respect to per-capita household food consumption. Especially, prime-age males have the highest elasticity. However, this result does not necessarily lead to a lower status of (prime-age) males inside of households, because a theoretical model shows that a higher consumption elasticity of a household member does not imply his or her weak status within the household.
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Research Products
(2 results)
