Does improved sanitation reduce diarrhea in children in rural India?

Kumar Santosh and Sebastian Vollmer
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Santosh Kumar Gautam

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Nearly nine million children under five years of age die annually. Diarrhea is considered to be the second leading cause of Under-5 mortality in developing countries. About one out of five deaths are caused by diarrhea. In this paper, we use the newly available data set DLHS-3 to quantify the impact of access to improved sanitation on diarrheal morbidity for children under five years of age in India. Using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and propensity-based weighted regression, we find that access to improved sanitation reduces the risk of contracting diarrhea. Access to improved sanitation decreases child diarrhea incidence by 2.2 percentage points. There is considerable heterogeneity in the impacts of improved sanitation. We neither find statistically significant treatment eects for children in poor household nor for girls, however, boys and high socioeconomic status (SES) children experienced larger treatment effects. The results show that it is important to complement public policies on sanitation with policies that alleviate poverty, improve parent's education and promote gender equity.

Keywords: Water; Sanitation; Diarrhea; Propensity score; Matching; India. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 D10 I10 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-03-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hea and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/31804/1/MPRA_paper_31804.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/31808/1/MPRA_paper_31808.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Improved Sanitation Reduce Diarrhea in Children in Rural India? (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:pra:mprapa:31804

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().