EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Is household shock a boon or bane to the utilisation of preventive healthcare for children? Evidence from Uganda

Susmita Baulia

Economics & Human Biology, 2024, vol. 52, issue C

Abstract: This paper investigates how poor households in low-income countries trade off time investment in their children’s preventive healthcare vis-à-vis labour force participation during household-level health shocks. By using the reported illness or death of any household member as the indicator for an adverse health shock, I examine its effect on the intake of Vitamin A Supplementation (VAS) by children. Using four waves of the Uganda National Panel Survey, I find that children between 12–24 months are significantly more likely to get VAS when the household is under a health shock. I argue that this effect works through an economies of scale mechanism, by which the household adult(s) utilise the released time from the labour force during the shock to access remedial care from the healthcare facility and simultaneously obtain VAS for their children during the same visit. This arguably results from the high opportunity cost of time-constrained households, which is exacerbated by a mediocre service delivery side. To distinguish the unique mechanism of the health shock in this context, the effect and channels of an income shock are also explored. By proxying a negative income shock with the household-reported incidence of flood or drought, the study cautiously hints that VAS adoption may increase among the relatively wealthy who experience a dominating substitution effect of the income shock.

Keywords: Household shocks; Preventive child healthcare; Vitamin A supplementation; Time allocation; Uganda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J13 J22 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X23001144
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:52:y:2024:i:c:s1570677x23001144

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2023.101333

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:52:y:2024:i:c:s1570677x23001144