Gender Issues in Rural Household Economics

Also, the internal logic of the economists' model obscures the significance of intrahousehold dynamics, especially gender relations, in influencing social and economic behaviour. This short paper attempts to show how these shortcomings in the economic model of the household, specifically the agricultural household, derive partly from its roots in neo-classical economic theory and partly from the general limitations of economic analysis in dealing with social and economic relations beyond the market place. The Agricultural Household in Neo-Classical Economics2 Barnum and Squire [1979] were among the first to develop an economic model of the agricultural household in a developing economy.3 Their model draws heavily on the pioneering work of the Chicago economist, Gary Becker. Becker had, in the early l960s, broken with the conventional economic wisdom to develop a new approach to household economics that combined arguments about the economic rationality of household behaviour with neo-classical theory of the firm [Becker 1965]. The result was a household model that was consistent with the rest of neo-classical theory but that went one stage further, to conceptualise the household as both a producer and a consumer in the market place. The theoretical approach developed by Becker, generally known as the 'New Household Economics', has since been used in a variety of household models to estimate the size of household marketed surplus, price responsiveness and household income elasticity of demand [Barnum and Squire 1979; Singh, Squire and Strauss 1986; Nakajima 19701; patterns of labour supply [Yotopoulos 1984]; and demographic behaviour [Schultz 1988].