Intra-household Gender Disparities in Children’s Medical Care before Death in India

Abay Asfaw (), Stephan Klasen and Francesca Lamanna ()
Additional contact information
Abay Asfaw: Ethiopian Civil Service College
Francesca Lamanna: University of Göttingen

No 2586, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The excess female mortality in India and other South Asian countries is no longer contentious. Less known are the reasons for such excess female mortality in the country. In this study, we argue that intra-household gender-discrimination in receipt of medical attention can be one of the most important factors for the unbalanced sex ratio in the country. The 52nd Indian National Sample Survey, which collected for the first time detailed verbal autopsies of deceased persons, is used in the analysis. Place of death, which indicates whether a person get medical help immediately before her/his death, is used as a health indicator variable. The multinomial logit results show that keeping all other factors constant, girls are 1.7 percent less likely to die in hospital than their brothers. The coefficients of different interaction variables also reveal that the probability of infant and very young girls with live female siblings to die in hospital is extremely low. The robustness of the results is also checked using different indicators. The results confirm that girls are highly discriminated in access to hospital treatment and in the number of times being hospitalized before their death compared to boys. Therefore, in addition to the current effort of the government to control sex-selective abortions, efforts should be made to reduce the current intra-household gender-disparities in getting medical care at least for life threatening illnesses.

Keywords: gender discrimination; access to health care; place of death; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I12 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2007-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dcm, nep-dev and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2586.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Intra-household Gender Disparities in Childrens Medical Care before Death in India (2008)
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:iza:izadps:dp2586

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().