Abstract
The question of diverging interests and preferences within couples over the use of household resources and the consequences of these conflictual views has been present for a long time in the development literature, albeit in a somewhat scattered way. This paper selectively reviews the abundant literature that offers insights into the intra-household decision-making process, the strategies put in place by individuals to secure their access to private resources, and the role of the changing economic environment in altering these mechanisms. This paper bridges different strands of the social sciences and exemplifies the complementarities among them. The main features of household organization are described to set the scene for the individual strategies introduced to bypass intra-household negotiations and secure access to private resources. These strategies include efforts to maintain access to income-earning opportunities and secrecy about income and savings. This paper also discusses attempts to maintain or tilt the balance of power within the household through the use of violence, on the one hand, and marital and fertility choices on the other hand. Finally, this paper describes directions for future research aimed at improving the understanding of household behaviour and responses to economic stimuli.
Highlights
Public transfers to households are a common instrument in the ght against poverty
Winning a private cash prize increased the husbands' expenditures on in-kind gifts, while it increased wives' spending on cash gifts in the week that the lottery gains were earned. These dierences in patterns are consistent with women who hide income from their husband by distributing cash gifts, which they claim are more dicult to monitor than in-kind gifts. This result is consistent with the observation oered in Fapohuda (1988): women who have sucient economic autonomy invest in extended family relationships and social networks, thereby improving their bargaining position in their ongoing marital relationship
Notable are the gaps in the economic literature in four dimensions
Summary
Public transfers to households are a common instrument in the ght against poverty. Even when they are intended to benet several household members, public transfers are usually handed to one particular individual. Sociologists and anthropologists have delved in detail into the question of the social organization of the household and analysed how the historical and cultural contexts shape the household's decision-making processes For their part, economists have developed quantitative tools to evaluate individual well-being while assuming some specic household organizations but have often based their research on theoretical models that are not designed to take into account the complexities of households in developing countries. Underline the existing variation in the eciency of intra-household resource allocation across households They show that Pareto-ecient households reach better outcomes for children than inecient households (in terms of primary and secondary education) and that their responsiveness to cash transfer treatment is higher.
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