ESSAYS ON THE RELATION BETWEEN INCOME AND CHILD HEALTH IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY - BRAZIL

Abstract

This collection of essays analyzes the relationship between income and child health in Brazil. It is organized in four chapters. The first chapter describes the data used and discusses selected statistics. The main data sources are the Brazilian Household Budget Survey 2002/2003, the National Household Survey 1986, 1998 and 2003, the Demographic and Health National Survey 2006, and DataSUS, which includes indicators on health care provision compiled by the Ministry of Health. The second chapter establishes a positive association between health and income using many alternative measures of health. The analysis is divided into two parts. First, I estimate the income gradient with several different measures of child health to ensure the consistency of the income-health relationship. Then, I control for the role of confounding variables in determining the income-health relationship. I find that children living in poorer households are consistently more likely to have worse health. In addition, I find that irrespective of income levels, being born with low weight has effects on health status. Following this analysis and further building on previous work co-authored with Mauricio Reis, the third chapter investigates how the provision of health care affects child health and the income gradient. I find that the public provision of health care improves child health, with stronger effect on poor children, suggesting that the Brazilian health system can be a valuable tool to narrow the gap in the health status. The fourth chapter analyzes the income gradient since early childhood in Brazil by looking at the income-health relationship by age groups. Evidence from developed countries suggests that as people age the income-health relationship becomes more pronounced until adulthood. I find that the income-health relationship remains constant in Brazil. I attribute this apparent puzzle to the higher incidence of infectious diseases in the country and, to a lesser extent, to the access to the public health care system.