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In general, women’s wage work in the market economy may be characterized as relatively insecure, low-paid, unskilled, and gender-segregated. Gender differences become more pronounced when considering the realm of the agricultural marketplace, specifically in unpaid reproductive/care work in rural areas and non-remunerative productive work on the farm. This chapter reviews a large body of academic literature on development economics and labor economics, specifically focusing on gendered labor access and opportunities in the domains of the agricultural marketplace of developing countries. First, it conceptualizes gender-contested spaces in the agricultural marketplace and how gender differences are linked with social norms, economic constraints, institutions, international processes, and policy recommendations. Second, it analyzes major patterns and trends shaping the extent and nature of women’s experience in agriculture industries. It specifically explores the relationships between women’s agricultural labor force participation and economic development, trade liberalization, the availability of opportunities to work as wage laborers vs. self-employed farmers, and the impact of job creation through global value chains. Third, it elaborates on how gender differences are constructed and sustained specifically with regard to age, perceptions, social norms, time use, unremunerated productive work, agricultural productivity, landholding and management, and the allocation of land, labor, and other resources. Lastly, it extends the discussions on patterns, trends, and gender differences in the agricultural marketplace to how to dismantle the gendered structure of constraints and eliminate barriers to women’s participation. Drawing on an extensive review of relevant case studies from various parts of the world, it explores effective policies and techniques that brought impactful changes in women’s experiences. Along the way, it offers a comprehensive understanding of the drivers of success and failure and proposes recommendations for future initiatives and programs for improving women’s status in the agricultural marketplace.

We examine the impact of pollution from coal–fired power units on the anaemic status of children and women in India. The number of coal units in the district at the time of birth significantly increases the incidence of anaemia in young children as does in utero exposure. The number of coal units in the district also adversely affects the anaemic status of women, although the magnitude of impact is smaller than that for young children. The impacts are driven by the increase in PM2.5 pollution generated by coal-fired units. Our evidence points to anaemia as a significant health cost of coal-fired power generation in rapidly growing economies that use coal as a major source of fuel to meet increasing energy demands.

We evaluate the impact of oral polio vaccines on the incidence of disabilities in India, focusing on polio-related disability. Polio was hyperendemic in India even as recently as the early 1990s but the country was declared wild polio virus-free in 2014. Average treatment effects on the treated from difference-in-differences with multiple time period models that condition on time-invariant demographic and socio-economic characteristics reveal that with access to oral polio vaccines in the year of birth, the incidence of any disability, locomotor disability and polio-related disability declined by 61.4%, 57.3% and 55.9%, respectively. We test for pre-trends and estimate alternate specifications that offer support for these results. Heterogeneity analyses show that in general, access to oral vaccines in the year of birth lowers the incidence of disabilities across gender, rural/urban and education stratifications. An exception is low-caste groups where there is some evidence that post-period average ATT rose. The eradication of polio saved a significant number of lives and brought measurable health and economic benefits to the country.

This paper studies the impact of climate change on the nutritional status of very young children between the ages of 0 – 3 years by using weather data from the last half century merged with rich information on child, mother and household characteristics in rural coastal Bangladesh. We evaluate the health consequences of rising temperature and relative humidity and varying rainfall jointly. Leveraging a saturated fixed-effects model that controls for annual trends and location-specific seasonality, and that allows the impacts of temperature to vary non-parametrically while rainfall and humidity have flexible non-linear forms, we find that extreme heat and humidity in the month of birth exert significant negative effects on children's nutritional status as measured by mid upper arm circumference. The impact of humidity in particular persists when child, mother and household controls are included. We find that exposure to changing climate in utero and in the month of conception also matters. Possible explanations for our findings include consequences of varying heat, humidity, and rainfall on the extent of pasture, rain-fed and irrigated lands, on the propensity of household out-migration, and on mother's age at first marriage. We employ alternate models and undertake falsification tests to underline the robustness of the estimates. Our results indicate that climate change has real consequences for the health of very young populations who are in vulnerable areas.

This paper explores the association between income and stated views on minimum living standards; that is, views on items and activities that no one in today's society should have to go without. Using data from a large nationally representative survey, we find the rich are less empathetic. In our baseline model, people at the bottom of the income distribution report 10% more items as essential than do people at the top of the income distribution. The negative relationship between income and recommended minimum living standards is robust to conditioning on a large covariate set, and remains evident when we use alternative measures of economic status, such as wealth and neighborhood advantage. We find that area-level income inequality amplifies the negative income gradient, and that the rich are no more empathetic towards children than they are towards adults. We also find that changes in people's views across time are relatively small, and unrelated to major economic life events. An explanation for this stability is that views are formed primarily in childhood. We find that economic status in childhood has strong effects on views during adulthood, but that intergenerational economic mobility is unimportant.

Economic growth in emerging market economies has come hand-in-hand with growing demand for energy, with many of them meeting this higher demand by increased use of coal to fuel electricity generation. This paper examines the impact of pollution generated by coal fueled power units on the anemic status of children and women in India. We show that among very young children (aged 0–5 years), the number of coal units in the district in the month and year of birth significantly increases the likelihood of being anemic net of a comprehensive set of child, mother, household and district level controls. Exposure in utero matters as well for child anemia, while the number of coal plants in the district also induce greater anemia among adult women. Impacts on anemic status are driven by the growth of PM2.5 pollution attributable to emissions from coal-powered units. We undertake a series of falsification and specification checks to underline the robustness of our results. Our research adds anemia to the list of significant health costs of relying on coal-fired power generation in meeting the increasing demand for energy that emerging market economies like India face.

This paper studies BMI as a correlate of the early spatial distribution and intensity of Covid-19 across the districts of India and finds that conditional on a range of individual, household, and regional characteristics, adult BMI significantly predicts the likelihood that the district is a hotspot, the natural log of the confirmed number of cases, the case fatality rate, and the propensity that the district is a red zone. Controlling for air-pollution, rainfall, temperature, demographic factors that measure population density, the proportion of the elderly, and health infrastructure including per capita health spending, the proportion of respiratory cases, and the number of viral disease outbreaks in the recent past, does not diminish the predictive power of BMI in influencing the spatial incidence and spread of the virus. The association between adult BMI and measures of spatial outcomes is especially pronounced among educated populations in urban settings, and impervious to conditioning on differences in testing rates across states. We find that among women, BMI proxies for a range of comorbidities (hemoglobin, high blood pressure and high glucose levels) that affects the severity of the virus while among men, these health indicators are less important and exposure to risk of contracting the virus as measured by work propensities is explanatory. We conduct heterogeneity and sensitivity checks and control for differences that may arise due to variations in timing of onset. Our results provide a readily available health marker that may be used to identify especially at-risk populations in developing countries like India.

Few studies have examined the "echo effect" of early-life shocks related to prenatal malnutrition, that is, whether the legacy of such shocks is transmitted to the next generation. This study addresses this gap by leveraging extreme malnutrition during the Great Leap Forward famine in China, and by examining the intergenerational consequences of the famine on those who were not directly impacted. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the causal effect of the famine on a wide range of outcomes of children of mothers who were exposed in-utero including income, education, employment, and intergenerational income mobility; indicators that have not been considered in detail in the literature. We further contribute by using a refined measure of famine exposure at the prefecture level in rural areas, and by exploiting rich data on those directly affected and their children. We find that on average, the famine had negative echo effects on second-generation outcomes. These echo effects are primarily due to the adverse impacts on daughters, perhaps reflecting a combination of positive selection of sons born to mothers exposed to prenatal malnutrition during the famine and cultural aspects such as son preference. Our results withstand a battery of robustness and specification checks.

This study on the economics of gender differences examines whether the mining industry acts as a blessing or curse for women's well-being and economic status. The analysis focuses on the impact of proximity to mineral deposits and active mines on various measures of women's agency and health in India. Identification leverages the plausibly exogenous spatial variation in the occurrence of mineral deposits across districts. Results indicate that women's outcomes improve in the vicinity of mines with improvements in shared decision-making, reductions in barriers to accessing medical care, and reduced tolerance of physical violence. These benefits are pronounced among younger women, and in the proximity of mines that employ relatively high shares of women. The underlying mechanisms include employment gains for women and improvements in women's health near mines. Their children also experience gains in nutritional status. Men's likelihood of making decisions jointly with partners increases, and men are less likely to justify domestic violence. A key explanation for these results is the sharing of mining royalties with local groups that support investments in women and children. Findings imply that mineral mining can bring substantial benefits to women's well-being, which is critical for sustainable development.