Sickness and Death: Economic Consequences and Coping Strategies of the Urban Poor in Bangladesh

Farid Khan, Arjun Bedi and Robert Sparrow ()

World Development, 2015, vol. 72, issue C, 255-266

Abstract: We investigate the economic consequences of sickness and death and the manner in which poor urban households in Bangladesh respond to such events. Based on panel data we assess the effects of morbidity and mortality episodes on household income, medical spending, labor supply, and consumption. We find that despite maintaining household labor supply, serious illness exerts a negative effect on income for the poor. However, the estimates do not reject consumption smoothing. The most prominent responses to finance current needs are increasing household debt through borrowing and depleting productive assets, both of which have detrimental effects on future consumption.

Keywords: sickness; death; consumption smoothing; coping strategies; Bangladesh; Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15000674
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:wdevel:v:72:y:2015:i:c:p:255-266

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.03.008

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().