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

Amy Ickowitz

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Ghana has the lowest under-five mortality rate in West Africa. Understanding why Ghana’s child mortality rate is lower than in neighboring 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 favorable 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 neighbors -- Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, 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 neighbors. 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 Côte d’Ivoire. These results suggest that even poor countries that have been ‘cursed’ by bad geography can potentially improve development outcomes and save children’s lives.

Keywords: child mortality; geography; health; policy; Africa; Ghana; Burkina Faso; Togo; Côte d’Ivoire (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I15 I18 O10 O12 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/52905/1/MPRA_paper_52905.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: 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:pra:mprapa:52905

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 ().