Essays on Gender Inequality and Health in Bhutan

Gender inequality is a great social injustice. Many countries still experience high levels of discrimination between men and women. The issue is particularly pertinent in Bhutan, where there are significant gender inequalities in education, employment, and health. The first study of this thesis examines the gender wage gap in Bhutan using data for the period 2012 to 2019. This study employs a range of modelling and decomposition approaches to provide deep insights into the gender wage gap. Also examined in this study, is how a change to Bhutan's minimum wage in 2014 impacted the gender wage gap. Results suggest a significant gender wage gap in rural areas compared to urban ones once socio-economic characteristics have been taken into account. The wage gap and discrimination are highest at the lower end of the wage distribution and then decrease gradually when moving up the distribution, thereby depicting a robust sticky floor effect. Also, the study finds that the minimum wage rate policy significantly improved wage income and reduced the gender wage gap at the lower end of the wage distribution. By examining gender differential effects in different sectors and on the minimum wage policy, this study makes an important contribution to the existing literature. The second study examines the impact of the national-level alcohol and tobacco policies on alcohol, tobacco, and areca nut consumption in Bhutan for the period 2007 to 2022. Using Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Trivariate Probit models, the economic relationships across drugs are investigated. To this extent, the study uses both drug price and drug control policies to examine how the demand for, say, areca nut responds to changes in areca nut price as well as alcohol and tobacco control policies. This allows the establishment of crucial cross-drug relationships that are extremely useful towards formulating effective drug policies and anti-drug campaigns. This study finds that alcohol and areca nut are sensitive to their own prices. In terms of cross-drug relationships, consumption of both tobacco and areca nut reduces in response to alcohol control policies, indicating they are economic complements for alcohol. Also, the study finds alcohol and areca nut products are economic complements to tobacco; the consumption of both drugs declines in response to tobacco control policies. This study is the first to determine economic relationships across different types of demerit goods in Bhutan. The third study constructs a mental health index using the World Health Organisation’s Global School-based Student Health Survey data and investigates the determinants of mental health in school-aged adolescents in Bhutan, using advanced techniques such as the Receiver Operating Characteristics and the Lasso regression. The study finds that strong parental and peer support reduce adolescent mental health risks, while negative experiences like injuries and bullying increase them. Adolescent females, particularly those who engage in alcohol abuse, are more likely to have mental health problems. Lifestyle factors such as sedentary behavior and smoking are positively associated with mental health issues. Highlighted in this study is the complex interplay of socio-demographic and lifestyle variables in shaping adolescent mental health outcomes in Bhutan.