The paper attempted to analyze the socioeconomic determinants of child
vaccination in Pakistan particularly focusing on women education and
empowerment. Micro-data having 3221 observations from Pakistan
Demographic and Health Survey 2012-13 has been used in binary logistic
regression. The woman (mother) education is taken as a categorical
variable, i.e. primary, middle, secondary and higher to see that what level
of education has influence on child vaccination. To capture the effect of
woman empowerment on child vaccination two variables are included the
analysis, i.e. woman decision-making index and woman violence index.
The other explanatory variables are child’s sex (household’s attitude
towards gender discrimination), birth-interval (fertility behavior), wealth
index (socioeconomic status of the household), place of delivery and
postnatal-care (child and maternal health seeking behavior), woman’s
working status, household size and provincial residence of the household).
The results have shown that woman education and empowerment (woman
decision-making index and woman violence index) increase the probability
of child vaccination in Pakistan. The primary level of woman education is
also functional to increase the likelihood of child vaccination. Higher the
level of woman education, higher is the probability of child vaccination.
The results demonstrate very significant policy option for woman
education and empowerment. The results further explain that birthinterval
of the child, place of delivery, postnatal-care, wealth index
enhance the probability of child vaccination while woman’s working status
and household size diminish the likelihood of child vaccination. In the
provincial residence of the household, the children from the province of
Sindh are less likely to have vaccination.