Empirics of health-aid, education and infant mortality: a semiparametric study

Debasri Mukherjee () and Elsy Thomas Kizhakethalackal

Applied Economics, 2013, vol. 45, issue 22, 3137-3150

Abstract: The present article uses semiparametric regression to capture the impact of foreign-aid given for health purposes on the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) of poor developing countries, after controlling for other covariates. We also investigate whether education (general awareness) helps lower IMR directly or helps improve effectiveness of health-aid in reducing IMR. In addition, the study investigates whether various disaggregated components of health-aid (for example, aid that goes for infectious disease control or nutrition) help lower IMR. We find that although adult education (awareness) always lowers IMR, the overall effect of health-aid remains insignificant. Our conclusion is robust to various disaggregated components of health-aid as well. We also check if health-aid has improved prenatal care for expecting mothers but our conclusion regarding the overall ineffectiveness of aid remains unchanged. Interestingly, we find that total health-aid as well as nutrition aid may lower IMR only after education exceeds a threshold level -- a new angle that has not been explicitly explored before . We also find interesting role of education in making the aid more effective for prenatal care. Our semiparametric nonlinear estimation strategy helps us unravel certain interesting thresholds and facts which cannot be captured in a linear parametric estimation framework.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2012.699186 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:45:y:2013:i:22:p:3137-3150

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2012.699186

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().