Diana Fletschner, UW Evans School of Public AffairsRural Households' Market Orientation: What Can We Learn from Spouses' Behavioral Attributes?Time: 12:30 pm on 10.23.2009 Policy interventions aiming to alleviate rural poverty have increasingly focused on improving poor households’ access to labor, finance, commodities, and service markets. These efforts typically take a supply-side approach, attempting to address households’ constraints by expanding the availability of credit and by providing job-training programs. However, these initiatives often neglect demand-side characteristics that affect households’ willingness to enrol in training programs, take out loans, or engage in more market-oriented activities. In this paper, I use an intrahousehold bargaining framework to explore how the behavioral attributes of husbands and wives—in this case, their willingness to take risks or to engage in competition—help predict the economic decisions households are likely to make. This work uses data gathered from 500 couples in Central Vietnam and builds on a paper co-authored with Leigh Anderson and Alison Cullen in which we had demonstrated that, compared to men, women in this region are less likely to take risks or to choose to engage in competition. |
