 Unintended consequences of welfare reform: Evidence from birthweight of Aboriginal children in AustraliaMary-Alice Doyle, Stefanie Schurer and Sven Silburn Journal of Health Economics, 2022, vol. 84, issue C Abstract: In 2007, Australia introduced its most radical welfare reform in recent history, targeting Aboriginal communities with the aim of protecting children from harm. The ‘income management’ policy forced Aboriginal welfare recipients to spend at least half of their government transfers on essentials (e.g. food, housing), and less on non-essentials (e.g. alcohol, tobacco). By exploiting its staggered rollout, we estimate the impact of in utero exposure to the policy rollout on birthweight. We find that exposure to the income management policy reduced average birthweight robustly by 85 g and increased the risk of low birth weight by 3 percentage points. This finding is not explained by behavioral change (fertility, maternal risk behavior, access to care), or survival probabilities of at-risk fetuses. More likely, a lack of policy implementation planning and infrastructure led to acute income insecurity and stress during the rollout period, exacerbating the existing health inequalities it sought to address. Keywords: Welfare reform; Aboriginal children; Birthweight; Income management; Unintended consequences (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:84:y:2022:i:c:s0167629622000388 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2022.102618 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier |
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