All-Cause Mortality Reductions from Measles Catchup Campaigns in Africa

Ariel BenYishay and Keith Kranker

Journal of Human Resources, 2015, vol. 50, issue 2, 516-547

Abstract: As recently as 1999, 13 million measles cases and 500,000 measles-related deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa per year. Over the past decade, vaccination coverage across the continent has improved dramatically, largely as a result of the Measles Initiative, an international effort coordinating and funding national mass-immunization campaigns. We estimate the reduction in all-cause child mortality after initial countrywide measles vaccination campaigns using variation in the timing of the campaigns across countries and subnational regions. This framework accounts for competing and complementary risks as well as for contemporaneous trends in mortality rates that may have biased case-based estimates. We use birth and death history data compiled from multiple Demographic and Health Surveys for 25 countries and control for country-specific trends in child mortality and time-varying factors that were associated with campaign timing. Our findings show that the Measles Initiative campaigns raised the probability of a child’s survival to 60 months by approximately 2.4 percentage points for cohorts treated by the campaign. The campaigns cost approximately $109 per child life saved, remarkably low in absolute terms as well as relative to other interventions to reduce global child mortality.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jhr.uwpress.org/cgi/reprint/50/2/516
A subscription is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.

Related works:
Working Paper: All-Cause Mortality Reductions from Measles Catchup Campaigns in Africa
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:uwp:jhriss:v:50:y:2015:i:2:p:516-547

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Human Resources from University of Wisconsin Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().