Essays on feminisation of poverty in India

Abstract

newlinePoverty has a distinct feminised face since significant share of the world s poor population is comprised of girls and women. The incidence of poverty among women both in terms of its scope and intensity has been dubbed in the literature as feminisation of poverty (FoP) which is defined as the increase in the proportion of women living in poverty over time. The objective of this dissertation is to analyse in depth the phenomenon of FoP with respect to a developing country, India. Identification of the accurate poor women population is one of the most important criteria of poverty eradication programmes. The successful implementation of such programmes in turn would require evidence of FoP that includes the identification of women living under poverty, measurement of the extent of such poverty across households and over time, as well as the proximate causes of such poverty. newlineThis dissertation consists of three substantive chapters along with introduction and conclusion, sequentially dealing with relevant issues pertaining to FoP. In the introduction, I present the idea of FoP as coined by Diana Pearce in 1978 and outline the objectives of the subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, I discuss the drawbacks of the existing measures of FoP, namely those based on identifying female headed households and measuring poverty levels in such households. I develop a set of criteria for defining FoP and based on the criteria, I introduce an alternative measure namely femaleness of households, to capture and estimate FoP. In Chapter 3, I present empirical evidence of the phenomenon of FoP across households in India, i.e., of inter-household FoP with the alternative measure and undertake a comparative assessment of FoP using the existing measure and the proposed measure. In Chapter 4, I assess one of the key plausible reasons for the existence of FoP, the presence of gender bias in intra-household allocation of resources at childhood, by analysing intra-household data and finding evidence of such bias. Finally, I conclude the disser