Does birth under-registration reduce childhood immunization? Evidence from the Dominican Republic

Steve Brito, Ana Corbacho () and Rene Osorio ()
Additional contact information
Ana Corbacho: International Monetary Fund
Rene Osorio: Inter-American Development Bank

Health Economics Review, 2017, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-18

Abstract: Abstract The consequences of lacking birth certificates remain largely unexplored in the economic literature. We intend to fill this knowledge gap studying the effect of lacking birth certificates on immunization of children in the Dominican Republic. This is an interesting country because a significant number of children of Haitian descent face the consequences of lacking proper documentation. We use the distance to the civil registry office and the mother’s document of identification as instrumental variables of the child’s birth certificate. After controlling for distance to immunization services and other determinants, this paper finds that children between 0 and 59 months of age that do not have birth certificates are behind by nearly one vaccine (out of a total of nine) compared to those that have birth certificates.

Keywords: Immunization; Under-registration; Health access (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s13561-017-0149-3 Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:hecrev:v:7:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1186_s13561-017-0149-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/13561

DOI: 10.1186/s13561-017-0149-3

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics Review is currently edited by J. Matthias Graf von der Schulenburg

More articles in Health Economics Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().