مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اصلاحات حقوق زنان و ترجیحات فرزندان در هند – الزویر 2018

We investigate whether legislation of equal inheritance rights for women modifies the historic preference for sons in India, and find that it exacerbates it. Children born after the reform in families with a firstborn daughter are 3.8-4.3 percentage points less likely to be girls, indicating that the reform encouraged female foeticide. We also find that the reform increased excess female infant mortality and son-biased fertility stopping. This suggests that the inheritance reform raised the costs of having daughters, consistent with which we document an increase in stated son preference in fertility post reform. We conclude that this is a case where legal reform was frustrated by persistence of cultural norms. We provide some suggestive evidence of slowly changing patrilocality norms.

Introduction

Two centuries ago, women in Europe and America were considered the property of men (fathers or husbands), having no intrinsic rights of their own. Women’s rights have been established by a long, slow process (described for instance in Doepke et al. 2012), in which legislation of their property rights was an important milestone. However, daughters still continue to have weaker property inheritance rights than sons in many developing countries today. In all of the Middle East and North Africa, in 50 percent of South Asian countries, 34 percent of sub-Saharan African countries, and 25 percent of East Asian and Pacific countries, inheritance laws either disfavour or altogether exclude women (World Bank 2011). Twenty-one of the 63 countries studied by Htun and Weldon (2011) have unequal property inheritance rights for men and women (WDR 2012). This is potentially a major factor in compromising the position of women. Property, and in particular land, is a critical determinant of economic and social status (Agarwal, 1994). Property rights are associated with increased investment, productivity, access to credit and labour market opportunities (Besley 1995; Banerjee et al. 2002; Field 2007; Besley and Ghatak 2009; Ghatak and Roy 2007). Land markets in developing countries are scarce and land is typically acquired through inheritance. As a result, even amongst the landowning classes, women in developing countries continue to be asset-poor, and unequal inheritance rights tend to perpetuate the condition in which women find themselves reliant upon men, having limited earning capacity and limited options outside marriage (Field 2007; Goldstein and Udry 2008; Chung and Dasgupta 2007). The equalization of inheritance rights may therefore be expected to be a powerful instrument for the empowerment of women. This has potential impacts on women’s labour supply (Joulfaian 2006), fertility (Ashraf et al. 2014), health (Jayaraman et al. 2013; Calvi et al. 2017) and mortality (Milazzo 2014). In addition, several studies show that the financial empowerment of women directly benefits children because women tend to invest more in children (e.g. Lundberg et al., 1997; Duflo and Udry 2004; Bobonis 2009; Baranov et al. 2017). There is also some evidence that women invest relatively more in girls, redressing gender inequality in the next generation (Thomas 1990, 1994; Dahl and Moretti 2008; Baranov et al. 2017). However, causal evidence that property rights empower women is limited, and the available evidence is somewhat mixed. In the context of India, inheritance rights for women were equalized with the rights of men by five states that enacted legislative reforms between 1976 and 1994, with federal legislation imposing equal rights for all states in 2005.