Contemporaneous Household Economic Well-being Response to Preschool Children Health Status in Cameroon

Abstract

This paper estimates the contemporaneous response of household economic well-being to child health status and examines gender disparities in the response process, while controlling for other correlates. The paper uses the 2001 Cameroon household consumption survey and a range of survey-based regressions to generate results. Child health (weight-given age) correlates positively and significantly with household economic well-being, surrogated by log of household total expenditures per adult. This suggests evidence of spill-over effects of child health on household production. The effect of child health on well-being in households headed by women is more than that of their male counterparts. This indicates that with better child health, female heads are likely to exploit the resulting extra-time, budgetary savings and peace of mind at work to increase household well-being more effectively than their male counterparts. These results have implications for public interventions that promote child-day-care/pre-nursery school centres as an important enabler for women to use the extra-time at their disposal to participate additionally in labour market/training opportunities. Investing in reproductive health, especially child health, given the right conditions, can engender income growth, reduce poverty and initiate the process of accumulation of human capabilities. 1.0 Introduction Improving access to and quality of general healthcare, and in particular reproductive health 1 is an important component of economic growth and poverty reduction because it shapes human capital and future livelihood opportunities. Early stages of human capital development hinge on child nutrition and health. Poor health during childhood consumes parental resources, time and concentration, and can affect growth potential, capacity to learn, future standards of living and the risk of morbidity and mortality in later years of life. Thus an important mechanism by which poor child health can have a contemporaneous impact on welfare of the household is a result of the increase demand for childcare contributing to lower productivity and labour supply of the parents and other working age members of the household who have to care for the children or expend limited income on their care. The economic benefits from improved child health come, in part, from reduced infant and child mortality and from reduced costs of healthcare for infants and children. These economic benefits are dominated by productivity gains from improved child health, which releases extra-time at the disposal of household members who participate in the labour market and from increased schooling and cognitive ability attributable to health in early childhood. According to empirical studies, better child health improves the timing of school entry, the number of years completed, the learning that takes place per year of schooling and the actual achievements in school, which are commonly shown to lead to increased lifetime earnings (Grantham-McGregor et al., 1999; Filmer and Pritchett 1999; Berhman and Rosenzweig, 2004). In this regard, children's health has been a major focus of the human capital production function literature in development economics, where production functions have been estimated for child height given age, weight given age, weight given height, birth weight, gestation age and diarrhoeal incidence (see for example, Rosenzweig and Schultz, 1983; Strauss, 1990; Strauss and