Elsevier

Health Policy

Volume 65, Issue 3, September 2003, Pages 277-299
Health Policy

Determinants of child mortality in LDCs: Empirical findings from demographic and health surveys

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-8510(03)00039-3Get rights and content

Abstract

Empirical studies on child mortality at the disaggregated level-by social-economic group or geographic location—are more informative for designing health polices. Using Demographic and Health Survey data from over 60 low-income countries, this study (1) presents global patterns of the level and inequality in child mortality and (2) investigates the determinants of child mortality, both at the national level and separately for urban and rural areas. The global patterns of health outcomes reveal two interesting observations. First, as child mortality declines, the gap in mortality between the poor and the better-off widens. Second, while child mortality in rural areas is substantially higher than in urban areas, the reduction in child mortality is much slower in rural areas where the poor are concentrated. This suggests that health interventions implemented in the past decade may not have been as effective as intended in reaching the poor. The analysis on mortality determination shows that at the national level access to electricity, incomes, vaccination in the first year of birth, and public health expenditure significantly reduce child mortality. The electricity effect is large and independent of the income effect. While in urban areas, access to electricity is the only significant mortality determinant, in rural areas, vaccination in the first year of birth is the only significant factor.

Introduction

To improve health outcomes for poor people in low income countries, efforts have been directed in two areas. First, improving the understanding of key determinants of health outcomes and identifying the principle causes of health gap between the poor and the better off. Second, translating empirical findings into policy interventions as reflected in the recent development strategies supported by the international agencies [1]. Strong advocacy for defining poverty in terms of human development and broadening of the traditional income/consumption definition of poverty has renewed the debate on health inequality. The World Bank (2000) compilation of the socioeconomic differences in health, nutrition, and population based on the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data, serves as the most comprehensive set of indicators on health inequality. Using survey data, Ref. [2] reviews trends in health inequality and identifies the causes of health inequalities using data from both developed and developing countries, and proposes approaches for evaluating the impact of anti-inequality polices.

However, to better understand the determinants of health outcomes, it is essential to measure health indicators and health inequality using reliable data sources. A major concern in deriving policy implications from evidence based on cross-country studies is the reliability and comparability of data sources. Ref. [3] has critically reviewed the potential problems associated with cross-county data. This problem is particularly acute in the estimates of child mortality as they are sensitive to data sources and estimation methods. Ref. [4] study on child mortality estimates complied by the United Nations shows substantial discrepancies among different estimates for the same county and same period, depending on the data source and the estimation method used. Therefore, to provide credible empirical evidence on health issues using cross county data efforts should focus on data comparability. In this regard, demographic and health surveys conducted in over 60 low-income countries are the superior data source. The DHS surveys use the same methodology to estimate health and other socioeconomic indicators and are comparable across countries and over time. Therefore, empirical studies based on the DHS data are expected to generate more reliable results (Table A1).

Translating research findings into operational priorities requires designing policies with strong poverty focus. These interventions should be effective in improving the average level of health (efficiency dimension) and in narrowing health inequalities (equity dimension). In reality, policy design needs to take account of the trade-offs between efficiency and equity concerns. However, to provide more informative policy recommendations, empirical analysis of health needs to be conducted at a disaggregate level, by socio-economic group, or by geographic location, as data permits. The emphasis of rural/urban separation is particularly useful from the policy perspective as geographical distinction is often more useful as targeting indicator than the income quintile. Also household access to safe water and sanitation, infrastructure, and health care, often varies sharply between urban and rural areas. Given that the poor are mainly concentrated in rural areas, it is likely that the determinants of health differ between the rural and urban population.

Another important health issue concerns the health outcomes of poor neighborhoods in urban areas [5]. A growing number of empirical studies highlight the importance of neighborhood effects on individual health among developed and developing countries.1 Among low-income countries, findings from the China National Child Health Survey [6] show that in urban areas, children living in neighborhoods with poor access to flush toilets have significantly high mortality risks, controlling for household socio-environmental conditions. Similarly, in urban Peru, children who live in neighborhoods with poor access to sanitation have low nutritional status, measured by height for age [7]. There also exists some evidence on widening disparity in urban access to basic services in developing countries. Hence, social benefits from public investment in poor neighborhoods in urban areas are likely to be high, based on efficiency and equity criteria. Unfortunately, the DHS data do not allow the construction of more disaggregate indicators on child mortality in poor urban neighborhoods for analyzing health outcomes in poor urban localities.

This study aims to identify key determinants of health outcomes in poor countries at the national level, and for rural and urban areas separately. We focus on two health indicators, infant mortality rate (IMR) and under-five mortality rate (U5MR). The primary data sources are the DHS and World Development Indicators (WDI). There exists a large body of empirical literature that focuses on the determinants of health outcomes based on data sources of various forms. These include: (1) cross-country data sources [4]2[8], [9], [10]3[11]) (2) cross-region data for a given country [12], [13]; and (3) household-level surveys including DHS and Fertility surveys [2], [6], [14], [15], [16]. In comparison to earlier cross-country studies, the main contributions of this study are: (1) use of the improved data source on health from DHS; (2) investigation of health determinants both at the national level and disaggregated by urban and rural location; and (3) application of the regression estimates to an effectiveness analysis which ranks alternative policy interventions based on their health impacts.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of health outcomes in low-income countries. In Section 3, we discuss data issues and summarize the data sources used in this study. Section 4 focuses on the issues relating to estimation methods. Section 5 presents the main findings. Section 6 illustrates the application of the results to effectiveness analysis. Section 7 concludes.

Section snippets

Patterns of health outcomes in LDCs

To capture the general patterns of health outcomes using DHS data, we focus on two measures: level of healthiness and inequality in health. Child mortality rates are generally regarded as the principal measures of country-level health status,4 although more comprehensive measures would include indicators measuring morbidity. The latter measures tend to be less reliable and in most cases, are

Why use DHS?

Data comparability is particularly important in conducting cross-county analysis of health outcomes, such as child mortality rates, which are sensitive to data sources and estimation methods.7

Estimation

To estimate the health determination model, we begin with a model which specifies health outcomes as a function of key groups of variables. Our choice of explanatory variables are based both on economic theory and empirical evidence from earlier work in this area. These include: (1) income; (2) social and environmental indicators, such as female education, access to sanitation, and access to safe water; (3) policy variables such as the share of public health expenditure in GDP; and (4)

Results

We first investigate the simple bivariate association between mortality rates and all potential explanatory variables. The correlation matrices are summarized in Table A2a–c. At the national level, variables which are highly correlated with mortality rates, ranked in descending order, include access to electricity, asset index, GDP per capita, access to piped water, access to sanitation, and female secondary education. However, the ranking is different at the regional level. In the urban data,

Effectiveness analysis

Effectiveness analysis is useful for ranking policy options. In principle we can apply the estimated coefficients from the model to an effectiveness analysis. The estimated coefficients provide measures of net impact of each intervention (which corresponds to each explanatory variable), keeping all other impacts constant. In turn, the inverse of the estimates, which we label as the effectiveness coefficients, are useful for comparing alternative interventions. They provide a measure of

Conclusion

The findings of this study on child mortality using cross-country DHS data consolidate results from earlier studies and add new evidence. We find evidence indicating that health interventions implemented in the past decade may not have been as effective as intended in reaching the poor at the national level. This is based on two observations from the global patterns of health outcomes cross 60 low-income countries: (1) there exists a negative association between the level and inequality in

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), TF024884. I also thank Julia Bucknall, Jan Bojö, Katherine Bolt, David Coady, Deon Filmer, Marianne Fay, Kirk Hamilton, Janet Hohnen, Jenny Lanjouw, Peter Lanjouw, Rama Chandra Reddy, Stefano Pagiola, Priya Shyamsundar, Jonathan Wadsworth, Adam Wagstaff and the referees for their useful discussions and comments on this paper. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions

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