Gender Gap, Intra Household Bargaining and Sex Selective Abortion in Albania

Keiti Kondi

Among European countries Albania has by far the highest sex ratio at birth with 1.12 boys per girls, compared to the European average of 1.058. Considering this disbalance, the aim of this paper is to analyze a mechanism that can lower the sex ratio by implementing policies that eliminate the sex bias in parents preferences for children and the gender gap in intra-household bargaining. We focus on the reasons behind parent’s choice for the sex of their children by considering different preferences for each of them. We try to solve the problematic of sex selective abortion by developing a parsimonious model which incorporates different utilities for boys and girls, the bargaining between family members and the decision about abortion dependent on its cost. We calibrate the model using data of the Demographic and Health Survey dataset on Albania for the year 2008 by measuring the preference for children for both sexes by the time invested in the child, education, violence, and women empowerment by how independent are women in taking decisions. Furthermore we find that if we increase gender empowerment and equalize preference in children sex ratio decreases by 0.04. To conclude we propose different policies that can help in the decline of the sex ratio disparity.

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 Presented in Session 134. International Perspectives on Women's Movements