Wealthiest Is Not Always Healthiest: What Explains Differences in Child Mortality in West Africa?

Amy Ickowitz

Journal of African Economies, 2012, vol. 21, issue 2, 192-227

Abstract: Ghana has the lowest under-five mortality rate in West Africa. Understanding why Ghana's child mortality rate is lower than in neighbouring countries may offer useful insights for other developing countries that are trying to improve child health. This paper explores whether Ghana's lower mortality rate is mostly a result of greater household wealth, better implementation of national health policies, or more favourable geography. The paper uses micro level data for children under five to examine relative child mortality risk between Ghana and each of its three immediate neighbours—Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast and Togo. A Cox proportional hazards model is used to test which of the three ‘contenders’—health policy, wealth or geography—best explains Ghana's mortality advantage. The results of the analysis indicate that wealth variables are not able to explain any of the child mortality variation between Ghana and its neighbours. Geography and health policy variables each explain about 40% of the mortality gap between Ghana and Burkina Faso. Health policy differences alone are able to explain about 70% of the child mortality gap between Ghana and the Ivory Coast. These results suggest that even poor countries that have been ‘cursed’ by bad geography can potentially improve development outcomes and save children's lives. Copyright 2012 , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejr035 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Wealthiest Is Not Always Healthiest: What Explains Differences in Child Mortality in West Africa? (2012)
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:oup:jafrec:v:21:y:2012:i:2:p:192-227

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().