Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This research proposes to analyze impacts of different food transfer modalities, in-kind and cash, on household welfare via the channel of women’s empowerment. Specifically, the focus is whether one scheme of food transfer enhances women’s bargaining power than another, leading to better household outcomes.

In order to clearly understand the mechanism of women-targeting cash transfer programs as a path way to enhance household welfare, this study takes two steps of analysis. The first phase examines the link between cash transfers and women’s bargaining power by testing the indicators of women’s empowerment used in the literature. These include i) women’s share of the household income, ii) asset ownership (agricultural land, livestock, and non-farm business, and iii) human capital measured by level of education. With the significant measures from the first step, the second part of the analysis estimates the relative effects of the two food aid schemes, namely cash vs in-kind, when higher bargaining power of women is present within the household by introducing interaction terms between bargaining power and cash transfer. In doing so, this study employs the fixed effects model and uses the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Surveys (ESS) jointly collected by the Ethiopian government and the World Bank, which are comprised of three-wave longitudinal household surveys from 2011 to 2016. If this study finds the process significant, the results may imply targeting women in social transfer programs actually is supported by empirical evidence and suggest an appropriate policy instrument of precisely targeting women’s bargaining power.