Barriers to opening the 'black box' of intra-household sharing of resources

The allocation of resources within the household is rarely examined, resulting in the household being treated as a ‘black box’. This chapter discusses the barriers to opening this ‘black box’, using the state of research in Japan as a case study. The barriers explored here include a view of gender inequality within households as resulting from women’s individual preferences, and hence being unproblematic; the failure to recognize the importance of incorporating intra-household allocation issues for measuring poverty and for policy debates; and technical difficulties in capturing resource distribution within households. A future research agenda should include, first, identifying the impact of focusing on intra-household distribution compared to conventional studies of household resources; second, further developing methodologies for understanding intra-household resource management and distribution; and third, as capabilities and autonomy are acknowledged to be central to individual wellbeing, exploring indicators to measure these as they relate to resources within the household.