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

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

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

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

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

Gradients of the Intergenerational Transmission of Health in Developing Countries

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the intergenerational transmission of health to exogenous changes in income, education and public health, changes that are often delivered by economic growth. It uses individual survey data on 2.24 million children born to 600000 mothers during 1970-2000 in 38 developing countries. These data are merged with macroeconomic data by country and birth cohort to create an unprecedentedly large sample of comparable data that exhibit massive variation in maternal and child health as well as in aggregate economic conditions. The country-level panel is exploited to control for aggregate shocks and trends in unobservables within countries, while a panel of children within mother is exploited to control for family-specific endowments and neighbourhood characteristics. Child health is indicated by infant survival and mother’s health by (relative) height. We find that improvements in mother’s education, income and public health provision that occur in the year of birth and the year before birth limit the degree to which child health is tied to family circumstance. The interaction (gradient) effects are, in general, most marked for shorter women suggesting that children are more likely to bear the penalty exerted by poor maternal health if they are conceived or born in adverse socio-economic conditions.intergenerational transmission, early life conditions, health, infant mortality, height, growth, income, education, public health, gene, environment, in utero