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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Social Norms And The Time Allocation Of Women's Labor In Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Social Norms And The Time Allocation Of Women's Labor In Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Economics
This paper proposes that major determinants of allocation of women's time are social norms that regulate the economic activities of women. Our emphasis on norms contrasts with approaches that view time allocation as determined by household-level economic variables. Using data from Burkina Faso, we show that social norms significantly explain differences in patterns of time allocation between two ethnic groups: Mossi and Bwa. Econometric results show women from the two groups exhibiting different responses to changes in farm capital. Implications are that policies that foster changes in social norms may have more permanent effects on altering women's behavior.
Microenterprise Lending To Female Entrepreneurs: Sacrificing Economic Growth For Poverty Alleviation?, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Microenterprise Lending To Female Entrepreneurs: Sacrificing Economic Growth For Poverty Alleviation?, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Economics
This research compares the performance of female and male entrepreneurs in a microenterprise credit program in Guatemala. Previous research and field practice has suggested that targeting credit at female borrowers allows for more substantial increases in household welfare, but that male entrepreneurs may more aggressively expand enterprises when given access to credit. In this paper, we develop a model that seeks to clarify why we might expect gender differences in economic responses to credit access. In general, our empirical results reveal that gender differences in economic responses to credit access are surprisingly small. However, we find that female entrepreneurs in …
Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray
Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray
Economics
Popular and official representations of the environment in Burkina Faso present soils as fragile and potentially subject to catastrophic collapse in fertility. In the cotton growing zone of southwestern Burkina Faso, researchers and policy makers attribute changes in land cover and land quality to population growth. This paper presents evidence questioning the dominant "population-degradation narrative" as applied to Burkina. We find that farmers are intensifying their production systems. While population has led to land scarcity, farmers are responding to both the resulting uncertainty in land rights and reductions in soil quality by intensifying the production process. Investments are used both …