Public health spending and infant and child mortality in India: a state-year panel analysis

Kaushalendra Kumar Kaushal, Abhishek Singh Abhishek, Faujdar Ram F Ram and S V Subramanian Subu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Background: To investigate the association between public health spending and probability of infant and child death in India. Methods: We used data from the three rounds of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted in India during 1992-93, 1998-99 and 2005-06 to investigate the association between public health spending and probability of infant and child death. We used data from the birth history of three NFHS rounds to create state-year panels of births, infant and child deaths, state-level public finance variables, food grain production, household and individual variables for the period 1980-2005. Two-stage probit regression model is used to investigate the association. State-level per capita gross fiscal deficit is used as an instrument for estimating two-stage probit model. Findings: Findings suggest association between public health spending and infant and child mortality in India. A 10% increase in per capita public health spending is likely to reduce the probability of infant and child deaths by 0•005 (95% CI: 0•003, 0•007) and 0•003 (95% CI: 0•002, 0•004) respectively. The second and third lags of public health spending were also statistically significant. Other factors affecting infant and child death were sex of the child, birth order, mother’s age at birth of the index child, mother’s schooling and urban-rural residence. Interpretation: Public health spending was associated with probability of infant and child death in India. Our findings lend support to the government’s initiative to increase public health spending in India.

Keywords: India; Public Spending on Health; infant and child mortality; Endogeneity; two-stage probit regression; instrument (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 I3 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dev and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/52425/1/MPRA_paper_52425.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:52425

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).