The bargaining power of men and women crucially shapes the resource allocation decisions households make (Quisumbing and de la Brière 2000). Husbands and wives often use their bargaining power to express different priorities about how resources should be allocated. Understanding these differences and their effects is critical if policymakers are to improve livelihoods. Increasing the bargaining power of one gender group rather than another can mean the difference between policy failure and policy success.

Traditional models of household economic behavior have portrayed households as unified entities. They assume that household members agree about decisions and share resources in the most equitable way possible. More recently, however, economists have come to view households as domains of difference, where multiple decisionmakers may have different preferences and, in many cases, control separate sets of resources. This new approach has greatly improved understanding of household resource allocation behavior.

One in every three preschool-aged children living in developing countries is malnourished. This disturbing yet preventable state of affairs causes untold suffering and, given its wide scale, is a major obstacle to the development process itself. Volumes have been written about the causes of child malnutrition and the actions that can be taken to reduce it— ranging from community-based feeding programs to accelerated economic growth (Smith and Haddad 2000).

Policymakers have many options for improving women’s status relative to men’s. The most appropriate set of actions in a given situation will naturally be specific to that context. This chapter outlines some policy actions that have proven successful, as summarized in Table 26.1, and gives some examples of their implementation.

Agrowing body of literature suggests that men and women allocate resources under their control in systematically different ways.

This chapter challenges one of the main tenets of agricultural economics—that households behave as though they are single individuals, with production factors allocated efficiently between men and women. In many contexts this is a convenient and innocuous assumption. It can be quite restrictive, however, when investigating the causes and welfare consequences of gender differences in agriculture.

Much empirical work has approached the problem of how resource allocations are made within households from the perspective that if preferences differ, welfare outcomes depend on the power of individuals to exert their own preferences. Measures of power are therefore a central component of quantitative empirical approaches to understanding how different preferences translate into different welfare outcomes. Following most of the empirical studies in this genre, this chapter focuses on dynamics within couples.

Among financial institutions serving poor households around the world, microfinance programs have emerged as important players. These programs typically make small loans—sometimes as small as US$50 to US$100 and sometimes as large as several thousand dollars-to households lacking access to formal-sector banks (see, for example, Lapenu and Zeller 2001). One important achievement of the microfinance movement has been its relative success in deliberately reaching out to poor women living in diverse socioeconomic environments.

Since 1997 Mexico has provided poor families with cash benefits linked to children’s school attendance and regular clinic attendance, as well as in-kind health benefits and nutritional supplements, through the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA). Unlike previous social programs in Mexico, this nationwide antipoverty program targets transfers to the mother of the family.

Many decisions that affect the well-being of individuals are made within families or households. The processes by which resources are allocated among individuals and the outcomes of those processes are commonly referred to as “intrahousehold resource allocation.” Since the early 1990s a growing literature has paid increasing attention to the role that intrahousehold resource allocation plays in affecting the outcome of development policy (see Strauss and Thomas 1995; Behrman 1997; Haddad, Hoddinott, and Alderman 1997 for reviews).

The previous sections have highlighted the importance of assets as a determinant of bargaining power within marriage. Both formal and informal institutions underlie asset accumulation and provide the basis for property rights. When women face social and legal restrictions in acquiring certain forms of assets, such as land, they may resort to accumulating other “assets” and investing in other forms of capital.

The concept of social capital, well grounded in the sociological and anthropological literatures (for example, Coleman 1988), is increasingly being analyzed and used by economists and other development policy practitioners. The entry point for many economists is Robert Putnam’s research on Italian regional economic performance (Putnam 1993) and his subsequent work in the United States. For Putnam, “social capital refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Putnam 1995, 67).