WOMEN EMPOWERMENT & CHILD HEALTH IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

拟议研究项目的目标是审查妇女赋权对儿童健康的影响。人们普遍认为，改善妇女相对于男子的状况将是改善儿童健康的有效途径。然而，令人惊讶的是，几乎没有令人信服的经验证据来证明妇女赋权对儿童健康的因果效应。我计划评估旨在改善妇女受教育机会、收入和政治参与的政策如何影响儿童健康。更具体地说，该项目有三个目标：1.评估增加妇女教育对其生育率和儿童健康的影响，并将这一影响与增加男子教育的影响进行比较。妇女教育和儿童健康之间的关系是否真的揭示了教育本身的影响，或者更确切地说，是一些未被观察到的家庭或社区特征的影响？我将通过研究印度尼西亚一项重大学校建设计划导致的女性教育增加如何影响她们孩子的健康来回答这个问题。2.确定妇女的短期收入波动对儿童健康的影响是否不同于男性的短期收入波动。我将通过利用科特迪瓦作物种植中的性别隔离来提供这个问题的证据。使用面板数据结合降雨量数据，我将检验当女性作物歉收时，儿童健康和营养受到的不利影响是否比男性作物时更严重。3.评估妇女参政对提供有利于儿童健康的公共产品的影响。我将利用一项随机试验来理清妇女参与的因果关系，在这项试验中，西孟加拉邦三分之一的村委会主席职位由一名妇女担任。为妇女保留主席职位的村委会是否承担了更多改善保健相关基础设施的项目？

The goal of the proposed research project is to examine the effect of women's empowerment on child health. It is widely believed that improving the situation of women relative to men is would be an efficient way to improve child health. Yet, there is surprisingly little convincing empirical evidence on the causal effect of women's empowerment on child health. I plan to estimate how policies designed to improve women's access to education, earnings, and political participation affect child health. More specifically, the project has three aims: 1. To estimate the effect of increasing the education of women on their fertility and children's health, and to compare this effect to the effect of increasing the education of men. Does the correlation between women's education and child health really uncover the effect of education per se, or rather the effect of some unobserved family or community characteristics? I will answer this by examining how increases in women's education due to a major school construction program in Indonesia affects the health of their children. 2. To determine whether women's short term income fluctuations have a different effect on child health than men's short term income fluctuations. I will provide evidence on this question by taking advantage of gender segregation in crop growing in Cote d'Ivoire. Using panel data in combination with rainfall data, I will examine whether child health and nutrition is more adversely affected when it is the women's crop that fails than when it is the man's crop. 3. To estimate the effect of women's political participation on the provision of public goods conducive to child health. I will disentangle the causal effect of women's participation by taking advantage of a randomized experiment, in which the chairperson position of one-third of the village councils in West Bengal (India) was reserved for a woman. Did the village councils in which the chairperson position was reserved for a woman undertake more projects to improve health related infrastructure?