The Impact of Macroeconomic Policies on the Anthropometric Measures of Children: Evidence from Bangladesh

In this paper we investigate the associations between macroeconomic policies and the health status of children in Bangladesh. We use three waves of a repeated cross-section dataset: Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey 2000, 2004 and 2007. We measure the health status of children by their anthropometric measures. The policies we evaluate are the Millennium Development Goals Focused Comprehensive Maternal Care Policies and the Poverty Reduction Strategy. Using the method of difference-in-differences we find positive impacts of the policies in improving the anthropometric measures of children. To account for the distributional consequences of the policies we also assess the impacts of the policies using the weighted-difference and difference-in-weighted-differences estimators. The weighted-difference estimator for a given policy and period is the difference between the average health of treatment and control children adjusted by inequality indices. We compute the difference-inweighted- differences estimator for a policy by taking the difference between the weighted-difference estimators in the post- and pre-policy periods. Applying this method we also observe positive associations between the policies and indicators of health. In this study we find that, in a developing country like Bangladesh, well-designed macroeconomic policies targeting the socioeconomic and health needs of children can lead to a substantial benefit to their health status.