Journal: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Conventional inequality and poverty analyses treat the household as a black box and implicitly assume an equal distribution of economic resources within a household. This analysis provides compelling evidence that distributional questions within the household — the most elementary social unit — cannot be ignored. The authors present trends in intra-household gender inequality for forty-five different countries across a four-decade period (1973–2016), using global micro-data from 2.85 million households. They find that earnings inequality between men and women within a household is systemic and prevalent across disparate societies. Further, this intra-household gender inequality does not abate substantially across the earnings and wealth distribution. For a sub-sample of countries, they show there exists a non-linear relationship between intra-household gender inequality and household economic status – that they refer to as the “micro-GKC” (micro Gender Kuznets Curve) relationship. They also show that the welfare loss from gender inequality within households exceeds welfare loss from population-level differences between the earnings of men and women. There is considerable policy attention on gender inequality via the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5 specifically seeks to achieve gender equality, but it is also implicit in other goals). They emphasize the multidimensional nature of gender inequality from a measurement perspective. They show that the global policy goal of gender equality cannot be fully achieved unless one analytically and empirically unpacks the household black box.
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