Women and household cash management: evidence from financial diaries in India

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

The European Journal of Development Research

Abstract

Using an innovative data set that involved 90 poor women logging in daily household financial diaries for a period of 11 months in 2008-2009 in the town of Ramanagaram, Karnataka, India, we address the following question: Do women use money differently from men? Comparing weekly cash expenses of 19 female-headed households with similar male-headed households, we arrived at several nuanced conclusions. For example, among the poorest households, women showed a greater tendency towards spending household cash on food items and they spent less on fuel and entertainment as compared with the male-headed households. Among the microfinance borrowers in our sample, the poorest among the female-headed households showed spending on jewellery, in contrast to the borrowers in the male-headed households spending on household assets. The fact that financial diaries data are more fine-grained and detailed than one-off surveys allows us to generalize these results for the urban-poor working in the informal sector.

Publication Date

13-2-2017

Publisher

Springer Nature

Volume

Vol.29

Issue

Iss.1

Link to Full Text
Request Access

Share

COinS