This study attempts to examine the role of women empowerment in the utilization of antenatal care in Bangladesh. Four dimensions are considered to measure the women empowerment: the highest level of education, freedom of choice/movement, power in the household decision making process and involvement in economic activities. Factor analysis technique is employed to construct the last three dimensions. The probit and the zero-inflated negative binomial regression models are specified and estimated using the 2011 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data. Results show that all four dimensions of women empowerment contribute positively and significantly to the decision and intensity of utilization of antenatal care in Bangladesh. Findings of the study have a number of policy implications on this issue for a developing country like Bangladesh.

Obtaining variances for the plug-in estimator of the Gini coefficient for inequality has preoccupied researchers for decades with proposed analytic formulae often cumbersome to apply, in addition to being obtained assuming an iid structure. Bhattacharya (2007, Journal of Econometrics) provides an (asymptotic) variance when data arise from a complex survey, a sampling design common with data frequently used in inequality studies. Under a complex survey sampling design, we prove that Bhattacharya's variance estimator is equivalent to an asymptotic version of the estimator derived by Binder and Kovačević (1995, Survey Methodology) more than a decade earlier. In addition, we show that Davidson's (2009, Journal of Econometrics) derived variance, for the iid case, is a simplification of that provided by Binder and Kovačević. These results are computationally useful, as the Binder and Kovačević variance estimator is straightforward to calculate in practice. To aid applied researchers, we show how auxiliary regressions can be used to generate the plug-in Gini estimator and its asymptotic variance, irrespective of the sampling design. Health data on the body mass index for Bangladeshi women is employed in an illustration.

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