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Summary: This paper estimates the causal effect of maternal participation in adult literacy programs on child mortality in rural Ghana, taking into account the possible endogeneity of program participation and endogenous program placement. Adult literacy program participation has a substantial impact on child mortality and is also cost-effective in reducing child mortality. The combined results of this paper point toward the potentially important role of adult literacy programs in promoting child health in Ghana through the acquisition of health knowledge by participants—in stark contrast with the decreased attention toward such programs in the developing world in recent years. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Each year, more than 300,000 children in India under the age of five years die from diarrheal diseases. Clean piped water and improved sanitation are known to be effective in reducing the mortality and morbidity burden of diarrhea but are not yet available to close to half of the Indian population. In this paper, we estimate the health benefits (reduced cases of diarrheal incidence and deaths averted) and economic benefits (measured by out-of-pocket treatment expenditure averted and value of insurance gained) of scaling up the coverage of piped water and improved sanitation among Indian households to a near-universal 95% level. We use IndiaSim, a previously validated, agent-based microsimulation platform to model disease progression and individual demographic and healthcare-seeking behavior in India, and use an iterative, stochastic procedure to simulate health and economic outcomes over time. We find that scaling up access to piped water and improved sanitation could avert 43,352 (95% uncertainty range [UR] 42,201–44,504) diarrheal episodes and 68 (95% UR 62–74) diarrheal deaths per 100,000 under-5 children per year, compared with the baseline. We estimate a saving of (in 2013 US$) $357,788 (95% $345,509–$370,067) in out-of-pocket diarrhea treatment expenditure, and $1646 (95% UR $1603–$1689) in incremental value of insurance per 100,000 under-5 children per year over baseline. The health and financial benefits are highly progressive, i.e. they reach poorer households more. Thus, scaling up access to piped water and improved sanitation can lead to large and equitable reductions in the burden of childhood diarrheal diseases in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We merge individual panel datasets with sub-county level administrative data on water supply projects. • We estimate fixed-effects panel regressions to account for spatial and temporal variation at the sub-county level. • Provision for improved water is found to have a significant effect on water usage and water collection times. • No statistically significant effects of improved water are found for reported diarrhoea incidence. • Our approach is a cost-effective means of evaluating development projects. This paper proposes a micro-based approach to investigate the impact of improved water provision on individual health outcomes in rural Uganda. We merge household and individual panel datasets with sub-county level administrative data on water supply projects. Our approach allows us to estimate fixed-effect panel data models which use temporal and spatial variation at the sub-county level as identifying variation. We find evidence that the installation of improved water sources leads to higher reported improved water usage, and shorter water collection times. However, increasing the sub-county rate of improved water sources per capita does not seem to be sufficient to lead to a statistically significant effect in the likelihood of individuals suffering from symptoms of illness associated with inadequate water supply. We argue that our micro-based approach provides a cost-effective means of evaluating development projects. The approach is scalable, i.e. it can be applied to other settings and countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the relationship between child mortality and the use of health care. We develop a simultaneous model of fetal and postnatal mortality risks and input demand equations for prenatal medical care and institutional delivery. This model is applied to retrospective data from Peninsular Malaysia covering 1950-1988. The results show that prenatal medical care and institutional delivery have strong beneficial effects on child survival probabilities, and that these effects are substantially underestimated when adverse self-selection among users of health care is ignored. The effectiveness of prenatal health care in Malaysia improved until 1980, and then deteriorated. We find that the risk of infant and child mortality is not independent of fetal survival, but show that ignoring selective fetal survival introduces only mild biases in infant and child mortality estimation. Higher infant and child mortality rates among young mothers are partly explained by their lower likelihood of purchasing health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]