Childhood Mortality and Economic Growth

childhood mortality, economic growth, MDGs, India

Sibling-Linked Data in the Demographic and Health Surveys

This paper highlights an aspect of the enormous and little-exploited potential of the Demographic and Health Surveys, namely the use of data on siblings. Such data can be used to control for family-level unobserved heterogeneity that might confound the relationship of interest and to study correlations in sibling outcomes. These uses are illustrated with examples. The paper ends with a discussion of potential problems associated with the sibling data being derived from retrospective fertility histories of mothers.siblings, unobserved heterogeneity, retrospective fertility histories, state dependence, DHS, India.

Is Child Work Necessary?

This paper investigates the hypothesis that child labour is compelled by poverty or that the child's income contribution is needed by the household in order to meet subsistence expenditures. We show that a testable implication of this hypothesis is that the wage elasticity of child labour supply is negative. Using a large household survey for rural Pakistan, labour supply models for boys and girls in wage work are estimated. Conditioning on non-labour income and a range of demographic variables, we identify a negative wage elasticity for boys and an elasticity that is insignificantly different from zero for girls. Thus while the evidence is consistent with boys working on account of poverty compulsions, the evidence is ambiguous in the case of girls. The results are argued to be of interest to recent theoretical and policy developments in this area.child labour, education, poverty, gender, labour supply

Early Childhood Investments in Human Capital: Parental Resources and Preferences

This paper investigates the way in which parental human capital investment in young co-resident children varies with their own consumption. It is motivated by rejection of parental altruism in recent research, the unexpectedly small effects of parental income on child outcomes found in a number of studies, and the claim in several historical and anthropological studies of child labour that parents are selfish. Models of child labour and human capital typically assume parental altruism and, in many cases, this assumption is critical to the model. The results suggest that, in the preference function of parents, child human capital is a normal good and that child labour is a bad, consistent with altruism.altruism, m-demands, intra-household allocation, cash transfers, child poverty, tobacco

Childhood Mortality and Economic Growth

This paper investigates the extent to which the decline in childhood mortality over the last three decades can be attributed to economic growth. In doing this, it exploits the considerable variation in growth over this period, across states and over time. The analysis is able to condition upon a number of economic and demographic variables. The estimates are used to produce a crude estimate of the rate of economic growth that would be necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing the under-5 mortality by two thirds, from its level in 1990, by the year 2015. The main conclusion is that, while growth does have a significant impact on mortality risk, growth alone cannot be relied upon to achieve the goal.childhood mortality, economic growth, MDGs, India

Welfare Implications of Fiscal Reform: The Case of Food Subsidies in India

Child malnutrition, Food subsidies, Poverty, Welfare , Health, Gender, India

Parent Altruism, Cash Transfers and Child Poverty

This paper investigates the contemporary sharing of household resources between parents and co-resident children, motivated by the increasing popularity of cash transfers targeted at children, and limited evidence of their efficacy. It argues that this provides information on parental altruism which, though commonly assumed, has been challenged in recent research. The main finding is that the within-household allocation of resources is consistent with altruism. A further finding is that households that smoke (spend on tobacco) systematically spend less on children.altruism, m-demands, intra-household allocation, human capital, child labour, education

Poverty and survival

A recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival. But equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant. Using state‐level panel data for India, we contribute the first estimates of the impact of changes in poverty on infant survival. We identify a significant within-state relationship which persists conditional upon state income, indicating the size of survival gains from redistribution in favour of households below the poverty line. The poverty elasticity declines over time after 1981. It is invariant to controlling for income inequality but diminished upon controlling for education, fertility and state health expenditure, and eliminated once we introduce controls for omitted trends.poverty, income, inequality, infant mortality, India, economic reform, state health expenditure, panel data.

Poverty and Survival

A recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival. But equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant. Using state-level panel data for India, we contribute the first estimates of the impact of changes in poverty on infant survival. We identify a significant within-state relationship which persists conditional upon state income, indicating the size of survival gains from redistribution in favour of households below the poverty line. The poverty elasticity declines over time after 1981. It is invariant to controlling for income inequality but diminished upon controlling for education, fertility and state health expenditure, and eliminated once we introduce controls for omitted trends.poverty, income, inequality, infant mortality, India, economic reform, state health expenditure, panel data

Intergenerational persistence in health in developing countries: the penalty of gender inequality

This paper is motivated to investigate the often neglected payoff to investments in the health of girls and women in terms of next generation outcomes. This paper investigates the intergenerational persistence of health across time and region as well as across the distribution of maternal health. It uses comparable micro-data on as many as 2.24 million children born of about 0.6 million mothers in 38 developing countries in the 31 year period, 1970-2000. Mother's health is indicated by her height, BMI and anemia status. Child health is indicated by mortality risk and anthropometric failure. We find a positive relationship between maternal and child health across indicators and highlight nonlinearities in these relationships. The results suggest that both contemporary and childhood health of the mother matter and that the benefits to the next generation are likely to be persistent. Averaging across the sample, persistence shows a considerable decline over time. Disaggregation shows that the decline is only significant in Latin America. Persistence has remained largely constant in Asia and has risen in Africa. The paper provides the first cross-country estimates of the intergenerational persistence in health and the first estimates of trends.intergenerational persistence, mobility, health, developing countries, cohort trends, inequality