Maternal Schooling and Child Health Revisited: Does Non-Formal Education Matter? (Draft)

Type Working Paper
Title Maternal Schooling and Child Health Revisited: Does Non-Formal Education Matter? (Draft)
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2004
URL http://www.hha.dk/nat/workshop/2004/nhb2012.pdf
Abstract
This paper examines the impact of maternal literacy and numeracy skills and schooling on the production of children’s health in Ghana. The analysis considers child health inputs and outputs, examining the determinants of vaccinations, postnatal care and mortality. Previous studies of the determinants of child health have mostly been limited to investigating the impact of maternal schooling only and, as a consequence, largely have not considered skills, including literacy and numeracy skills, and also have ignored alternative routes to acquiring skills, such as adult literacy programs. Analyzing a recent household survey for Ghana, this paper addresses both of these issues. To allow for the possible endogeneity of maternal skills and schooling an IV-based estimation approach is pursued. In addition to the well-established finding of a positive impact of maternal formal schooling on child health input demand and child mortality I also find a substantial impact from adult literacy course participation and also some impact form literacy and numeracy skills. These results points towards the potentially important role of adult literacy programs in promoting child health through the acquisition of health knowledge by participants, something which has previously received little to no attention in the economics literature but has important policy implications.

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