The author analyzes the allocation of foreign aid to various sectors in a recipient developing country. Donors tend to favor social sectors over other public expenditure programs. Due to incomplete information, donors may concentrate too much on priority sectors, leaving lower-priority yet...

Since women are half the world, every Government decision, and every economic process affects them. The definition of what constitutes a women's issue must be more restrictive than this. Three approaches are suggested. On one, policies are seen as women's issues to the extent that they affect...

This paper examines the effects of men's and women's participation in group-based micro-credit programs on a large set of qualitative responses to questions that characterize women's autonomy and gender relations within the household. The data come from a special survey carried out in rural...

The collective approach to household behavior relaxes the restrictive features of the unitary model by specifying household welfare as a weighted combination of the individuals'utilities. But the weights are assumed fixed or exogenous to the analysis. The authors extend the collective approach...

Son preference is known to be found in certain types of cultures, that is patrilineal cultures. But what explains the fact that China, South Korea, and Northwest India manifest such extreme child sex ratios compared with other patrilineal societies? This paper argues that what makes these...

This paper analyzes the determinants of HIV infection and associated sexual behaviors using data from the first five Demographic and Health Surveys to include HIV testing for a representative sample of the adult population. Emerging from a wealth of country relevant results, four important...

Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards on...

Using historical census data and the latest household surveys, the authors investigate changes in female employment in Latin America, the factors that determine women's participation in the labor force, and the reasons for the gap between men's and women's earnings. The authors find, to their...

The author investigates the extent and determinants of poor child health and nutrition in rural Guatemala, as reflected in attained height. Exploiting a rich data set on relevant social, economic, ethnic, and geographic characteristics, he estimates the role played by exogeneous individual,...

Educated parents tend to have educated children. But is intergenerational transmission of human capital more nature, more nurture, or both? The author uses household survey data from Rwanda that contains a large proportion of children living in households without their biological parents. The...