tailieunhanh - DOES MOTHER’S EDUCATION MATTER IN CHILD’S HEALTH? EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH AFRICA

The empirical literature on human capital investment generally focuses on education and health investments using reduced form models that integrate the health production process with a model of household choice. The demand studies for health outcomes usually evaluate the impact that household and community level characteristics, like the usage and availability of health facilities, may have on distinct health measures. Among these, many have focused on the effect that mothers’ education has on children’s health measures such as birth weight, height and weight for age Z-scores or nutrient intake. . | South African Journal of Economics Vol. 76 4 December 2008 DOES MOTHER S EDUCATION MATTER IN CHILD S HEALTH EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH AFRICA1 PATRICIA MEDRANO CATHERINE RODRÍGUEZ1 AND EDGAR VILLA Abstract Using the 1993 South Africa Integrated Household Survey this paper studies the effect that mother s education through the knowledge channel has on children s health using height for age Z-scores as health measure. Under a two-stage least square methodology we find that an increase in 4 years on mother s education approximately 1 standard deviation will lead to an increase of standard deviations on her child s height for age Z-score. We also find as the medical literature suggests support for the hypothesis that mother s education is more important for children older than 24 months of age. JEL Classification I12 I21 O15 D1 Keywords Education health Z-score 1. INTRODUCTION Poverty can be thought of as a vicious circle. Low-income households have less education and are probably less healthy than wealthier ones making it very difficult for them to leave that poverty state through their own work and effort. It has been previously established that investments in children s health and education could help break this circle by enhancing individual s future income through their future productivity. For instance Currie and Hyson 1999 Case et al. 2003 and Behrman and Rosenzweig 2004 have found strong links between child s health and future income education attainment and adult health. Not surprisingly many of the Millennium Development Goals are related to the improvement of children s education and In this paper we touch on this important subject and asses the impact that investment in mother s education through the knowledge channel has on children s health measured as height for age. Conditions within a household are important determinants of a child s health and as one might expect parents play a central role in producing children with good health . Specifically .