Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Adverse shocks, household expenditure and child marriage: evidence from India and Vietnam

  • Published:
Empirical Economics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Child marriage is associated with negative outcomes in regard to education, health and economic empowerment in later life. While the consequences of child marriage have been studied extensively, there has been limited discussion on the drivers of child marriage. This paper examines the impact of adverse shocks on child marriage. We use a sample of 886 girls between 12 and 18 years of age from India and Vietnam involved in the Young Lives project. The potential endogeneity problem is addressed by using rainfall deviation as the instrument. We find that in Vietnam, where bride price payment is a common practice in the event of expenditure reduction resulting from adverse shocks, a household may consider marrying off their daughter as a possible coping strategy. In contrast, in India where dowry payments are common, shocks may reduce the probability of child marriage, possibly, because a girl’s family is unable to meet the dowry requirements. These findings are robust to alternative ways of measuring child marriage, expenditure and rainfall deviation. We recommend that policies designed to reduce child marriage are considered in the context of cultural and social norms.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Refer to Sect. 2 for a detailed literature review on consequences and determinants of child marriage.

  2. Refer to Sect. 3 for a detailed description of the Young Lives project.

  3. According to India’s Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006, the legal age for marriage is 18 years for women and 21 years for men.

  4. The concept of sentinel sites come from health surveillance studies and is a form of purposive sampling where the site, or ‘cluster’, is deemed to represent a certain type of population, and is expected to reflect trends affecting those particular people or areas.

  5. For more details about the sampling design, see Young Lives Project (2011).

  6. This is consistent with the literature showing that girls are often considered ready for marriage at the onset of puberty, which usually occurs in the early teenage years (Field and Ambrus 2008).

  7. We do not use information from the first round, because no marriage is observed before 12 years of age. For children who experience marriage between 15 and 18 years of age (in which case the dependent variable equals 1), we could construct explanatory variables using information from the third round. For children who experience marriage before 15 years of age (in which case the dependent variable equals 1), we could construct explanatory variables using information from the second round. Consistent with the literature, we define child marriage as marriage under 18 years of age and thus do not distinguish these two cases. Nevertheless, we conduct such investigations in a further extension in Sect. 5.

  8. We also conduct an attrition bias test following Outes-Leon and Dercon (2009). The results, presented in “Appendix 1”, indicate that attrition on observables is unlikely to lead to significant bias.

  9. Area refers to province and district in Vietnam and India, respectively.

  10. The Young Lives project collects information on whether households experienced natural disasters in the last 4 years since the interview date. However, our analysis did not employ this self-reported measure, because it is likely to be endogenous and vary across households. Such self-reported data could correlate with unobserved personality traits such as pessimism that also determine the likelihood of child marriage, thus introducing potential endogeneity bias from a different source. That said, our results remain consistent should we employ this addition instrument variable.

  11. As a robustness check, we also use household expenditure rather than rainfall deviation. The results, presented in “Appendix 2”, are consistent with those in Table 7.

  12. Our sample shows that in Vietnam, 76% and 10% of the household harvest rice and maize as main crop; whereas in India, 50%, 30% and 10% harvest rice, wheat and pulses as main crop. We construct dummies for these crops and interact with main variable. However, consistent with Panel A in Table 7, we did not find evidence of heterogeneity. To conserve space, we do not report these results.

References

  • Abiona O (2017) The impact of unanticipated economic shocks on the demand for contraceptives: evidence from Uganda. Health Econ 26(12):1696–1709

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ahmed S, Khan S, Alia M, Noushad S (2013) Psychological impact evaluation of early marriages. Int J Endorsing Health Sci Res 1(2):84–86

    Google Scholar 

  • Becketti S, Gould W, Lillard L, Welch F (1988) The panel study of income dynamics after fourteen years: an evaluation. J Labor Econ 6(4):472–492

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chari A, Heath R, Maertens A, Fatima F (2017) The causal effect of maternal age at marriage on child wellbeing: evidence from India. J Dev Econ 127:42–55

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Corno L, Voena A (2016) Selling daughters: Age of marriage, income shocks and the bride price tradition. IFS working papers, London, England

  • Corno L, Hildebrandt N, Voena A (2017) Age of marriage, weather shocks, and the direction of marriage payments. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cornwell K, Inder B (2015) Child health and rainfall in early life. J Dev Stud 51(7):865–880

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Delprato M, Akyeampong K, Sabates R, Hernandez-Fernandez J (2015) On the impact of early marriage on schooling outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and South West Asia. Int J Educ Dev 44:42–55

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Delprato M, Akyeampong K, Dunne M (2017) Intergenerational education effects of early marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa. World Dev 91:173–192

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Deschênes O, Greenstone M (2007) The economic impacts of climate change: evidence from agricultural output and random fluctuations in weather. Am Econ Rev 97(1):354–385

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Field E, Ambrus A (2008) Early marriage, age of menarche, and female schooling attainment in Bangladesh. J Polit Econ 116(5):881–930

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Godha D, Hotchkiss DR, Gage AJ (2013) Association between child marriage and reproductive health outcomes and service utilization: a multi-country study from South Asia. J Adolesc Health 52(5):552–558

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harper C, Jones N, Presler-Marshall E, Walker D (2014) Unhappily ever after. Slow and uneven progress in the fight against early marriage. Overseas Development Institute, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoogeveen J, Van Der Klaauw B, Van Lomwel G (2011) On the timing of marriage, cattle, and shocks. Econ Dev Cultural Change 60(1):121–154

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Howe LD, Hargreaves JR, Gabrysch S, Huttly SR (2009) Is the wealth index a proxy for consumption expenditure? A systematic review. J Epidemiol Commun Health 63(11):871–877

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jensen R, Thornton R (2003) Early female marriage in the developing world. Gender Dev 11(2):9–19

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Klugman J, Hanmer L, Twigg S, Hasan T, McCleary-Sills J, Santamaria J (2014) Voice and agency: Empowering women and girls for shared prosperity. The World Bank, Washington, DC

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Le Strat Y, Dubertret C, Le Foll B (2011) Child marriage in the United States and its association with mental health in women. Pediatrics 128(3):524–530

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lohmann S, Lechtenfeld T (2015) The effect of drought on health outcomes and health expenditures in rural Vietnam. World Dev 72:432–448

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mathur S, Greene M, Malhotra A (2003) Too young to wed: the lives, rights and health of young married girls. International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), Washington, DC

  • Mendelsohn R, Nordhaus WD, Shaw D (1994) The impact of global warming on agriculture: a Ricardian analysis. Am Econ Rev 84(4):753–771

    Google Scholar 

  • Montgomery MR, Gragnolati M, Burke KA, Paredes E (2000) Measuring living standards with proxy variables. Demography 37(2):155–174

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nasrullah M, Zakar R, Zakar MZ (2014) Child marriage and its associations with controlling behaviors and spousal violence against adolescent and young women in Pakistan. J Adolesc Health 55(6):804–809

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nguyen MC, Wodon Q, Wodon Q (2014) Impact of child marriage on literacy and education attainment in Africa. UNICEF and UNESCO Statistics. The World Bank, Washington, DC

    Google Scholar 

  • Nour NM (2006) Health consequences of child marriage in Africa. Emerg Infect Dis 12(11):1644

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Outes-Leon ID, Dercon S (2009) Survey attrition and attrition bias in Young Lives, technical note 5. Young Lives, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Parsons J, Edmeades J, Kes A, Petroni S, Sexton M, Wodon Q (2015) Economic impacts of child marriage: a review of the literature. Rev Faith Int Aff 13(3):12–22

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Raj A, Saggurti N, Balaiah D, Silverman JG (2009) Prevalence of child marriage and its effect on fertility and fertility-control outcomes of young women in India: a cross-sectional, observational study. The Lancet 373(9678):1883–1889

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rutstein SJ, Johnson K (2004) The DHS Wealth Index. ORC Macro, Calverton

    Google Scholar 

  • Schlenker W, Roberts MJ (2009) Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change. Proc Natl Acad Sci 106(37):15594–15598

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sekhri S, Debnath S (2014) Intergenerational consequences of early age marriages of girls: effect on children’s human capital. J Dev Stud 50(12):1670–1686

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stock JH, Yogo M (2002) Testing for weak instruments in linear IV regression. National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Thai TQ, Falaris EM (2014) Child schooling, child health, and rainfall shocks: evidence from rural Vietnam. J Dev Stud 50(7):1025–1037

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trinh TA (2018) The impact of climate change on agriculture: findings from households in Vietnam. Environ Resour Econ 71(4):897–921

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Trinh TA (2020) Mental health impacts of child labour: evidence from Vietnam and India. J Dev Stud. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2020.1746280

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • UNFPA (2018) Understanding child marriage in Vietnam. Green One UN House, Hanoi

    Google Scholar 

  • UNICEF (2009) Child protection from violence, exploitation and abuse. UNICEF Thematic Report 2009. UNICEF, New York, NY

  • UNICEF (2019a) Child marriage. https://www.unfpa.org/child-marriage. Accessed on 22 Oct 2019

  • UNICEF (2019b) Child marriage. https://www.unicef.org/protection/child-marriage. Accessed on 22 Oct 2019

  • UNICEF (2019c) Ending child marriage: a profile of progress in India. https://data.unicef.org/resources/ending-child-marriage-a-profile-of-progress-in-india/. Accessed on 22 Oct 2019

  • Wachs TD (2008) Mechanisms linking parental education and stunting. The Lancet 371(9609):280–281

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young Lives Project (2011) Young lives methods guide: sampling. Young Lives, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Simon Feeny and Alberto Posso for their helpful comments on early version of this paper. The authors are also thankful to anonymous reviewer and associate editor for their constructive comments. All errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Quanda Zhang.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 8.

Table 8 Attrition bias test

Appendix 2

See Table 9.

Table 9 Alternative investigation on heterogeneous effects

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Trinh, TA., Zhang, Q. Adverse shocks, household expenditure and child marriage: evidence from India and Vietnam. Empir Econ 61, 1617–1639 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01907-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-020-01907-2

Keywords

JEL Classification

Navigation