4 effect of household income allocated to adults from the total, and thus identifies the intrahousehold resource allocation sharing-rule between adults and children<sup>1</sup> .

Child gender bias is a common problem, yet the most promising method for its analysis, namely the Rothbarth method of inferring child gender inequality from the consumption pattern of the household’s adult members, first proposed in Deaton (1987) in application to Cote D’Ivoire<sup>2</sup> , has produced little, if any, interest despite strong evidence of bias against girls by welfare outcomes in many countries to which it has been applied over the last two decades<sup>3</sup> . Recently, however, Koohi-Kamali (2007) has demonstrated the problems in these applications, and the effectiveness of the adult goods method in revealing discrimination against girls in household consumption pattern, once

> <sup>1</sup> The model may be based on the total level of adult goods expenditure as a group to be taken as adult welfare indicator. The identification of such an aggregate group involves hazardous guessing about its sub-groups. It is thus safer to employ easily identified individual adult goods, and the later applications of the method are typically based on such commodities. Moreover, inferring adult welfare from the aggregate group of adults goods comes at a cost, since an additional identification assumption is required to interpret behaviour, namely that different adult goods are affected by changing number of children as if they had only income effects, i.e. substitution effects due to changes in within-group relative prices were absent, see Deaton al et. (1989). In this study, I follow the commonly employed individual commodities version of the model. It should, however, be noted that employing narrow commodity groups can cause problems since goods such as tobacco are not very responsive to changes in income, see Cramer (1969), although evidence suggests this difficulty is less severe for developing countries.

> <sup>2</sup> Subsequently published, with an additional application to Thailand, as Deaton (1989).

> <sup>3</sup> Deaton (1997) contains references on the countries studied to that date, and China (People’s Republic), is first examined in Burgess and Zhuang (2003); the third attempt on Indian data is Case and Deaton (2002). Bhalotra and Attfield (1998), and Gong et al. (2005) are the second attempts with, respectively, rural Pakistani and Chinese data, while Gibson and Rozelle (2004) applies the model to Papua New Guinea. This list is unlikely to be exhaustive. In a new study on gender and intrahousehold inequality in Ethiopia, Kebede (2008) argues that detection of gender bias in consumption of adult goods must be based on a system of demand equations, rather than single equations, in order to allow for price effects because demand may be affected by income changes in one direction, but by price changes in another, thus gender effects obtained from income changes alone, as in Rothbarth’s method, may be misleading. This study is based on a system of adult goods equations applied to the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey, a four-round panel survey. Kedebe’s tests for gender bias by income, and by price effects separately, indicate statistically significant bias against Ethiopian girls for based on income effects. However, when the income and price effects are considered together to provide a distinctly superior approach, the adverse against girls evidence _disappears_ , Kebede (2008. p.23). Kedebe suspects this outcome to be due to the household distributing risk among different demographic groups rather than just one, though considers examining the question “quite beyond the scope” of the study. However, if risk distribution affecting both boys and girls were the explanation, one would expect to find similar results by welfare outcomes in Ethiopia, which is clearly contradicted by evidence, see table 6 below.