Land and schooling: transferring wealth across generations

This article, a summary of the book sharing the same title, examines issues around the allocation of land and education within families. Based on household surveys in Ghana, Indonesia and the Philippines, the book attempts to answer key questions, including:How do parents allocate land and education between sons and daughters?How do changing returns to land and human capital affect parents’ investments in children?What do gender differences in land and schooling mean for the welfare of men and women?Is gender equity compatible with efficiency and growth?The authors find that:in the Philippines, where farming is much more intensive in male labour, sons inherit more land, and daughters receive more schoolingin Indonesia, in areas where men work primarily on rubber agroforestry and women specialise in lowland paddy production, men inherit rubber fields and women inherit paddy fields. In schooling investments, men and women were treated equally.in Ghana women contribute about 30 percent of the labour required in cocoa farming and own nearly 30 percent of cocoa land. However, women were disfavoured in both land transfers and schooling, although this gender gap has been appreciably reduced over time.The implications of these findings for policy include:policies must extend and strengthen schooling systems in rural areas and increase women's educational attainment:parents' decisions to invest in girls' education are more sensitive to the price of education, the quality of schooling, the extent of learning, and teacher attitudes than are their decisions to invest in boys' educationinvestments that reduce distance to school, as well as investments in basic water and energy infrastructure, can help female enrolment rates in part by reducing the opportunity cost of schooling for girlspolicies must promote competition in non-farm labour markets so as to eliminate discrimination against women. Investments in time-saving infrastructure, such as adequate childcare, can reduce women's opportunity costs of participating in the labour marketin labour-constrained economies, new technologies could make women's labour more productive by, for instance, improving the efficiency of food processing or fuel collection.[adapted from author]