Women’s Bargaining Power and Children’s Schooling Outcomes: Evidence From Ghana

ABSTRACT

This study uses data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey to examine the link between women’s bargaining power and children’s schooling outcomes. It employs a principal component analysis to generate an index measuring women’s bargaining power based on a couples’ education gap and age gap when their child reaches age 6. It then uses women’s age at first marriage as an instrument to identify women’s bargaining power. The results show that women’s bargaining power holds no significant association with late school enrollment. However, it has a negative and significant association with the probability and intensity of grade repetition (the number of times the same grade is repeated), especially for firstborn children. Girls tend to benefit more from the mother’s bargaining power compared to boys. The study further shows that women’s bargaining power is linked with school enrollment and attainment, which confirms previous findings in the literature.

Highlights

• • Slow school progression caused by late enrollment and grade repetition is a problem worldwide, especially in developing countries.

• • This study examines the impact of women's intrahousehold bargaining power on children's schooling outcomes in Ghana.

• • Increased women's bargaining power has no effect on the timing of school enrollment but reduces the chances of grade repetition and how many times the same grade is repeated.

• • Girls benefit more from their mothers' bargaining power compared to boys.

• • Women's bargaining power has a larger impact on the education of firstborn children than on subsequent children.

• • Policies aimed at empowering women will improve children's schooling outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s bargaining power
• late enrollment
• grade repetition
• intensity of grade repetition
• Ghana

JEL Codes:

• D13
• I2

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge the Ghana Statistical Service for providing the data used in this study. We are also grateful to the associate editor, four anonymous referees, Russell Smyth, Arjun Bedi, and Wenli Cheng for their suggestions on improving the earlier version of the manuscript. We thank participants at the 2018 American Economic Association meeting in Philadelphia, USA, 31st Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE) in Glasgow, Scotland, 13th Australasian Development Economics Workshop (ADEW), Sydney, Australia, and Brown Bag Seminar Series at the Centre for Applied Finance and Economics (CAFÉ), UniSA Business School for their comments. This project received financial support from the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship as part of Clifford Afoakwah’s PhD.

Notes

1 On the supply side, Jere Brophy (2006) argues that grade repetition creates inefficiency and waste of social resources because each student’s repetition economically affects the addition of new grade entrants. These problems include the need for larger class sizes, more teaching and support staff, and the demand for extra desks and supplies.

2 For example, the amount of money spent on food, school supplies, sports activities, and so on.

3 In this study, primary education refers to the first nine years of schooling, which is also known as basic education in Ghana.

4 Ghana, for example, exceeded the UN’s Millenium Development Goal of universal primary education in 2013–14 by recording a 107.3 percent gross enrollment rate (UN 2015).

5 We do not include women’s relative earnings because our dataset does not include information on the couple’s earnings when the child reaches age 6, hence, women’s current earnings may not reflect their earnings position when the child reached age 6.

6 In Ghana, educated women are found to have higher bargaining power within their marriage and more autonomy over contraceptive use (Crissman, Adanu, and Harlow 2012).

7 Ghana’s primary education begins at age 6 and is divided into primary school (six years) and junior high school (three years). This level of education is a continuous process where students complete primary school at age 12 and continue directly to junior high unless the student has repeated a grade. In other words, without grade repetition, a 15-year-old child should have nine years of schooling.

8 We compute late enrollment and grade repetition as such because the Ghana Living Standard Survey does not include an explicit question on whether the child enrolled late or has repeated a grade.

9 Figure 6 shows that late enrollment and grade repetition are highest among rural dwellers.

10 Detailed explanations of all the variables are presented in Table 1.

11 Figure A1 compares women’s years of schooling to that of the man.

12 We focus on households in which the mother and father are both present.

13 These are children whose actual completed years of schooling are less than their expected completed years of schooling, hence progressing slowly in school. It is likely to be upward biased because it includes any repetition that occurs throughout the nine years of children’s primary education and not in a given year as estimated by other studies. Also, this figure represents slow progression because it includes children who might have dropped out and come back to school due to some reason or may have been held back due to switching from one school to the other. The study is, however, unable to separate the two because it cannot identify those who stopped schooling but have returned to school or changed schools.

14 Birth order is computed based on children who are between ages 7–15 in the household, that is, the oldest child in primary school.

15 A summary of the main findings is presented in Table 9.

16 This partly could be due to the small sample of subsequent children as 93.8 percent of children in the sample are firstborns. We also used an interaction between birth order and women’s bargaining power, and the results were qualitatively similar to those presented in Table 5.

17 A 7-year-old child is expected to have one year of completed schooling given that he or she started schooling at age 6, which is the official age of primary school enrollment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clifford Afoakwah

Clifford Afoakwah is Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Health Economics, Griffith University. His research areas include development economics, health economics, and applied micro-econometrics. He has consulted widely for international organizations such as United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), United Nations University-Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA), and African Economic Research Consortium (AERC).

Xin Deng

Xin Deng is Senior Lecturer in Economics at the UniSA Business School. Xin holds a PhD in Economics from Monash University, and has broad research interests in applied microeconomics and related areas. Her research encompasses a wide range of topics that are linked with three areas: labor market, banking and finance and environment. Her current research focuses on workforce diversity and disadvantaged groups in labor market with particular focus on female and older job seekers.

Ilke Onur

Ilke Onur is Senior Lecturer of Economics, at the UniSA Business School. Ilke earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. His general field of research is applied microeconomics with special focus on industrial organization, auctions, health and development economics.