THE IMPACT OF HOUSEHOLD WEALTH ON CHILD SURVIVAL IN GHANA
Author
Stella Lartey Rasheda Khanam Shingo Takahashi
Year
2016
Abstract
This paper pools four waves of data from Demographic and Health Surveys (from 1993 to 2008) to examine the impact of household wealth status on child survival in Ghana. The Weibull hazard model with gamma frailty was used to estimate the general wealth effect, as well as the trend of wealth effect on child’s survival probability. We find that household wealth status has a negative and significant effect on the hazard rate. Thus a child is more likely to survive when he/she is from a household with high wealth status. Even though wealth effect declined over the years, the risk of death for children from the poorest households was about 1.7 times higher than those from the richest households. Among other factors, birth spacing and parental education are found to be highly significant to increase a child’s survival probability.
