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Intra-household Gender Disparities in Children’s Medical Care before Death in India

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Author Info
Abay Asfaw () (International Food Policy Research Institute)
Stephan Klasen () (Göttingen University and IZA)
Francesca Lamanna () (Göttingen University)

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Abstract

The excess female mortality in India and other South Asian countries is no longer contentious. Less known are the reasons for such excess female mortality in the country. In this study, we argue that intra-household gender-discrimination in receipt of medical attention can be one of the most important factors for the unbalanced sex ratio in the country. The 52nd Indian National Sample Survey, which collected for the first time detailed verbal autopsies of deceased persons, is used in the analysis. Place of death, which indicates whether a person get medical help immediately before her/his death, is used as a health indicator variable. The multinomial logit results show that keeping all other factors constant, girls are 1.7 percent less likely to die in hospital than their brothers. The coefficients of different interaction variables also reveal that the probability of infant and very young girls with live female siblings to die in hospital is extremely low. The robustness of the results is also checked using different indicators. The results confirm that girls are highly discriminated in access to hospital treatment and in the number of times being hospitalized before their death compared to boys. Therefore, in addition to the current effort of the government to control sex-selective abortions, efforts should be made to reduce the current intra-household gender-disparities in getting medical care at least for life threatening illnesses.

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Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number 2586.

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Length: 29 pages
Date of creation: Jan 2007
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Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2586

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Related research
Keywords: gender discrimination; access to health care; place of death; India;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Production
J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Lata Gangadharan & Pushkar Maitra, 2000. "Does Child Mortality Reflect Gender Bias? Evidence from Pakistan," Indian Economic Review, Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, vol. 35(2), pages 113-131, July.
  2. Wolfe, Barbara L & Behrman, Jere R, 1984. "Determinants of Women's Health Status and Health-Care Utilization in a Developing Country: A Latent Variable Approach," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 66(4), pages 696-703, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Klasen, Stephan, 1994. ""Missing women" reconsidered," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 22(7), pages 1061-1071, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Arjan Gjonca & Cecilia Tomassini & James W. Vaupel, 1999. "Male-female differences in mortality in the developed world," MPIDR Working Papers WP-1999-009, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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