Women's Access to Credit: Does It Matter for Household Efficiency?

Studies that assess the impact of credit constraints on farm households' efficiency have largely used the household as the unit of analysis. This can be problematic when there are gender-based market imperfections and asymmetries in how rights, resources, and responsibilities are distributed within the household. Constraints on women matter: in addition to the efficiency loss associated with the husbands' credit constraints, when women are unable to meet their needs for capital, their households experienced an additional 11% drop in efficiency. This suggests that there are efficiency-based arguments for enhancing women's access to capital and that studies based only on the household's head may significantly underestimate the true economic impact of credit constraints. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.