| Abstract: | ABSTRACT This paper examines the functioning of the household economy and family labour supply over a five-year period among a panel sample of poor households in Madras using an event history methodology. The research focused on the key role women play in sustaining poor households despite constrained labour market choices. Women's earnings from daily self-employed work activities provided a substantial and steady component to total household income which tended to fluctuate with the earnings and family pool contribution of casually employed males. As economic stress events hit the family over time, women helped by increasing earnings, adding on secondary jobs, utilizing their earning status to obtain loans from a variety of sources, sacrificing their subsidized business loan for family debt repayment, and foregoing personal expenditures and leisure. At the same time women also managed the increasingly more difficult tasks of fulfilling basic needs of the household such as food, fuel and water collection, sanitation and childcare with less resources of time. Development policies must reflect the fact that women are central to individual family survival and as a whole they are key actors in the adjustment process to the crises in employment occurring in the local and national economy. |
