Working Paper #2019-052
Climate shocks, coping responses and gender gap in human development
This study examines the impact of drought on child health and schooling
outcomes and investigates the contemporaneous relationship between these
two main building blocks of human capital. We merge childlevel
longitudinal data from the Ethiopia Rural Socioeconomic Survey (ERSS)
with geo-referenced climate data. Our findings from within-child
variation estimators reveal that drought has a detrimental impact on the
highest grade completed of female children. We show that the negative
e ect of drought on a female child's completed years of formal schooling
is channelled, albeit not entirely, through ill health. Our result is
robust to using recursive bivariate estimation with exclusion
restriction to correct for biases associated with the endogeneity of
child health due to time-varying heterogeneities. Gender bias in the
household explains why the direct and mediated schooling e ects of
drought are concentrated only on female children. We find that
households respond to drought-induced income shocks by decreasing the
allocation of resources for the medical treatment of an ill female
child. Moreover, households also increase the use of female child labour
for non-agricultural activities, which is consistent with a
disproportionate increase in school absenteeism of older girls during
drought. We discuss how gender-responsive policy design and
implementation may help alleviate gender inequality in human development
in the face of climate change.
- Keywords
-
- Drought
- coping capacity
- human capital
- gender bias
- sub-Saharan Africa
- Ethiopia
- JEL codes
-
- D13
- I31
- J16
- Q54
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Haile, K., Tirivayi, N., & Nillesen, E. (2019). Climate shocks, coping responses and gender gap in human development (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2019-052). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=8405