‘Blood is Thicker than Water’: Economic Implications of Food Sharing Within Kinship Networks

In subsistence communities of Tanzania, we hypothesize that many small food transfers are made without the expectation of strict reciprocation, especially when these gifts are extended within close and extended family where altruistic feelings play a substantial role. Such transfers are often made to avoid direct financial transactions. We propose an extension of Alger and Weibull’s model of bilateral mutual exchange, where siblings not only choose to exert effort in production, but can also choose to allocate their resources to particular uses (i.e., consumptive versus productive assets). To empirically investigate the crop production effort choice and the asset accumulation predicted by the theoretical model, we use primary data collected in 2012 from 550 households located in four rural Tanzanian villages. For each household, we document their weeding effort in cultivation and their investment in consumptive assets. We also record, for each of their giving and receiving instances, the kinship tie between the receiver and the giver. Consistent with the theory, we find that when gifting is performed between villagers with closer family ties, effort in cultivation tends to be lower. Similarly, when family gifting ties are stronger, villagers will invest more in consumptive assets (e.g., TVs, radios, couches). We then discuss the development implications of our findings.