Women Empowerment, Parental Education and Future Human Capital Formation (Evidences from Urban Slum Area in India)

Abstract

Abstract The present paper intends to investigate the impact of women empowerment on future human capital formation in urban slum area of Kolkata, India. Education and health are two important dimensions of human capital formation. We construct women empowerment index comprising of legal and political dimension, interpersonal dimension sociocultural and economic dimension. To estimate the impact of women empowerment on education of the child, Heckman selection model is used while Logit model is used to study the impact of women empowerment on nutrition status of children. The empirical results indicate though women taking decision regarding child schooling has positive significant impact on school enrolment and continuing child’s education, financial independence plays a significant positive role only in continuing education of the child but not enrolling the children to education. We find that women empowerment has positive and significant impact on enrolling their children to school as well as continuing their school education. The positive effect of women empowerment index on the enrollment and school going behavior are stronger for female child than male child. Regarding health issues, we find that the probability of having a well-nourished child increases with the rise in the status of mothers’ empowerment, irrespective of the gender of the child. Other control variables, like monthly per capita income of the household, parental educational level especially mothers’ education level and co-habiting parents have expected significant positive impact on the education status of the children. JEL Classification: J16, J13, J24, J71