Abstract:
This study hypothesizes that the scarcity of agricultural resources in historical times resulted in fewer resources devoted to women, which eventually became ingrained in the culture and persists till today. Accordingly, we investigate the impact of the availability of historical agricultural resources on modern gender inequality. We measure the historical agricultural resources in two ways. The first measure is output based measure and refers to the average annual caloric yields per hectare based on the agro-climatic yields of pre-Columbian crops. We find that there are fewer missing women in countries (Indian districts) whose ancestors lived in regions with greater average annual caloric yields per hectare based on the agro-climatic yields of pre-Columbian crops. Our second historical resource measure is input based and refers to theancestral land that could potentially be used for agriculture. We find that the availability of ancestral arable land is negatively associated with modern gender inequality, measured by the United Nations Development Programme’s gender inequality index (GII). We further find that ancestral arable land is significantly, negatively associated with reproductive health (maternal mortality ratio and adolescent birth rate) and labor market outcomes (female-male labor force participation gap), but not with the indicators of women empowerment as measured by women’s share in parliament and gender educational attainment gap. Finally, we find that the respondents of the World Values Survey residing in sub-national regions with ancestral lands better suited to agriculture are less likely to hold the opinions that men ought to have more right to scarce jobs and that men make better political leaders than women.

Dr. Chandan Kumar Jha is an Assistant Professor in the Madden School of Business at Le Moyne College. His research interests lie in the areas of development economics, political economy, and finance and development. His current research focuses primarily on the issues of gender inequality and corruption, and he has published several articles on these issues inseveral reputed journals such as the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Population Economics, International Review of Economics and Finance among others. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Louisiana State University, an M.A. in economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, and a B.A. in economics (honours) from Magadh University.