Maternity support and child health: Unintended gendered effects

Aishwarya Kekre and Kanika Mahajan

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2023, vol. 51, issue 3, 880-898

Abstract: This paper evaluates a maternity support conditional cash transfer (CCT) scheme, launched in October 2011, on short and long-run health outcomes of children in India. We estimate intent-to-treat effects of the program by exploiting a natural experiment arising from select geographical implementation and the eligibility of program benefits for first/second born children using the National Family Health Survey-4 data. We find an increase in birth weight, duration of breastfeeding and long term weight-forage, with a larger impact on male children. The effects are positive for height-for-age and negative for infant mortality, albeit insignificant, and significantly negative for neonatal mortality but only over a longer time period. These results are in contrast to the existing two studies in the nascent literature, which in the context of limited availability of healthcare services, find no effect of maternity support CCTs on child health outcomes. Thus, our findings show that institutional factors that ensure access to local health infrastructure for meeting the imposed conditionalities are important for the success of maternal CCT schemes.

Keywords: Child health; Conditional cash transfer; Maternity support; Gender; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 H53 I18 I38 J16 J18 K32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596723000252
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:jcecon:v:51:y:2023:i:3:p:880-898

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2023.03.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland

More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().