Maternal health intervention and sex ratios: evidence from the Village Midwife Program in Indonesia

Md NAZMUL Ahsan and Tattwachaitanya RIDDI Maharaj
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Md NAZMUL Ahsan: Department of Economics, Saint Louis University,
Tattwachaitanya RIDDI Maharaj: Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur Math, Howrah, West Bengal, India

JODE - Journal of Demographic Economics, 2024, vol. 90, issue 2, 229-255

Abstract: In about last three decades, many developing countries have experienced a large decline in maternal mortality rates. Global initiatives leading to better maternal health policies may have contributed to this decline. In this paper, we investigate whether maternal health intervention also improves the fetal survival rate. For this purpose, we consider the Village Midwife Program in Indonesia, which was launched in 1989 as a part of the safe motherhood strategy. Using the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), we investigate the impact of midwives on fetal survival rate in terms of a change in the likelihood of a live birth being male. Our results show that the provision of a midwife in a community increases the probability of a live birth being male by about 3 percentage points. Greater antenatal care, skilled birth-attendance, and an improvement in nutrition among reproductive-age women—in terms of greater BMI—are the likely pathways. We do not find the results to be driven by pre-treatment trends, and they remain robust to a number of checks.

Keywords: Fetal origins hypothesis; Human capital formation; Maternal health policy; Trivers-Willard hypothesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 J13 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-05-13
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvde:v:90:y:2024:i:2:p:229-255

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