Women’s Bargaining Power within Family and Child Malnutrition in India

Dhiman Das, National University of Singapore

I study the role of women’s bargaining power within family in nutritional outcome of children in India. Child malnutrition has important bearing on human development and consequently economic development of a country and it is a serious concern for India. Several studies find little or limited impact of economic growth or the share of public expenditure on nutrition and health on child malnutrition in India. On the other hand, there is now a growing literature on empirical evidences of positive effect of women’s bargaining power on child malnutrition. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey I examine whether women’s bargaining power has an additional explanatory power over state-level per capita income and public intervention and how the bargaining power interacts with these factors. I expect to find that all of these factors – family level bargaining, economic growth and public intervention – have significant role on child nutritional outcome.