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

In this paper I study the effect of women’s bargaining power within family on nutritional outcome of children in India. 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 at the state level or the share of public expenditure on nutrition and health on child malnutrition in India. On the other hand, there is now growing empirical evidence from other developing countries on the positive effect of women’s bargaining power within family, on child malnutrition. Using data from the Demographic and Health Survey I examine whether women’s bargaining power at the household level 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 once we control for family level bargaining, we will see significant effect of both economic growth and public intervention on child nutritional outcome.