UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS ERASMUS UNIVERSITY ROTTERDAM HO CHI MINH CITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES VIETNAM THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM – THE NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS THE ROLE OF MATERNAL EDUCATION IN CHILD HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA BY NGUYEN THI HONG CAM MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY, December 2017 UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL STUDIES HO CHI MINH CITY THE HAGUE VIETNAM THE NETHERLANDS VIETNAM - NETHERLANDS PROGRAMME FOR M.A IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS THE ROLE OF MATERNAL EDUCATION IN CHILD HEALTH: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS By NGUYEN THI HONG CAM Academic Supervisor: VO TAT THANG HO CHI MINH CITY, December 2017 DECLARATION “I certify the content of this dissertation has not already been submitted for any degree and is not being currently submitted for any other degrees. I certify that, to the best of my knowledge, any help received in preparing this dissertation and all source used, have been acknowledged in this dissertation.” Signature Nguyen Thi Hong Cam Date: 1 January, 2018 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Vo Tat Thang, for his patience, motivation, enthusiasm, sympathy, immense knowledge, and for giving me valuable advice. His guidance helped me at all the time of research and writing of this thesis.
In addition, I would like to thank Prof. Nguyen Trong Hoai, Dr. Pham Khanh Nam and Dr. Nguyen Luu Bao Doan who have their expertise view with me, the valuable experience in research, and Dr.
Truong Dang Thuy who has provided the practical econometric technique, a valuable knowledge in research. Furthermore, I would also like to thank all lecturers and staff at the Vietnam Netherlands Program who already supported me wholeheartedly during my studying time in there. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude and affection towards my family for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study. My sincere thanks to all members in K22, who always devotes all love and all the best interest for me.
I am grateful for my best friends in encouraging me to start the thesis, persevere with it and finally to complete it. They always beside by me during difficult moment and sharing ups and downs with me and making my burdens lighter. Finally, I take this opportunity to express gratitude to Dr. I am extremely thankful and indebted to him for sharing expertise, and sincere and valuable guidance and encouragement extended to me.
ii ABSTRACT Children healthcare and gender discrimination are a real challenge to China in the process of achieving its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In this study, we investigate the influence of mothers’ education on the health status of their children in the context of China. The data are derived from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) which comprises information from 16,000 households and individuals collected from 25 provinces across China except for autonomous zones. The result shows that maternal education strength affects children’s health, and household wealth as well as gender and living area slightly impact on child health.
The study is one of the first research to estimate the influence of maternal education on child health by quantile regression while the historical papers used OLS or fixed effect to research those influences. Quantile regression is employed to analyze the impacts of mothers’ education on child health under different quantiles of the child’s body index variable. JEL classification: I14, I24 Keywords: Child health, maternal education, household wealth, BMI, China. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION i ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii ABSTRACT iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv LIST OF TABLES vi LIST OF FIGURES vii CHAPTER 1.
Scope of the study 11 1. Thesis structure 11 CHAPTER 2. The impact of maternal education on child health 15 2. The role of household wealth 19 2.
The effect of development economic on health 20 2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY and DATA RESOURCES 22 3. The constructed model 25 3. The background of data set 28 3.
Core module 29 iv 3. Gender and living area 34 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS 41 5. Limits of the study 42 REFERENCES 44 APPENDIX 47 List of variables using in data set 47 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Descriptive variables 32 Table 2: Correlation within variables 35 Table 3: OLS estimates of determinants of child weight and height 37 Table 4: Quantile regression for Child Weight and Height 38 Table 5:Simultaneous quantile regression results of Child BMI 39 Table 6:Simultaneous quantile regression of child weight for age on all covariates 40 Table 7: Quantile regression for Child BMI 48 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological systems theory 12 Figure 2: The linkage between maternal education and child health (UNICEF, 1998) 22 vii CHAPTER 1.
Research problem Nowadays, improving women and children healthcare is the goal of development for global economies. In assessing the level of children development, the health of child is used as a major indicator for child development (WHO, 2004), thus indirectly imposing child health as a key factor to determine the level of economic development. Women education plays an important role in child health, especially in developing countries. Caldwell (1979) supported that maternal education is the most crucial factor in different child health outcomes.
The recent trend in governmental policy making is to use resources (generated by economic development) to invest in education. When the level of education is improved, parental care-giving is advanced which shall indirectly lead to an improvement in child health. However, education is not the only factor impacting parenting and child health. Child health is affected by other determinants such as paternal education, health service availability, and socioeconomic status (Trussell et al.
1983 and Edmonston et al. (Dong et al., 2010) indicated that the relation between economic growth and household wealth is positive, thus implying that the maternal health and parental care-giving can be improved through resources and services. It can be concluded that wealth production is the pathway through which economic development can leave positive effect on parental care-giving and child health. Developing countries tend to have a concave association between child health and household wealth.
Evidences from developing countries have shown that household wealth and child health tend to have a concave association since the diminishing returns to life expectancy is linked to the growth of income (Belli et al. Both household wealth and maternal education are the pathways for economic development process and child health benefits (Stewart et al. Furthermore, many of these strategies are interdependent so researchers can analyze the influence of 8 each variable on child health to find out the magnitude of each strategy toward child health and women’s education policy within the host country. On the other hand, many studies concerned about the effect of environment and social contexts on child health.
For example, local health environment has significant contribution toward child health (Glewwe, 1999). However, the relation between household wealth and child health was less evident by current research. In 2000, Wagstaff estimated the levels of household consumption related with child mortality. The result shows that three over nine developing countries have no relationship between five levels of household exhaustion and mortality.
In addition, political context is another important factor that impacts child health. Based on evidence from 22 developing economies, the analysis concluded that the relationship between maternal education and child height for age is significant in cross-national discrepancies (Desai and Alva, 1998). However, developing countries are still facing other vital issues such as inequality in income as well as unbalanced healthcare and poor living conditions in rural areas. Many recent research evaluated the relation between maternal education and child health in developing countries because of difficult challenge in development progress.
The important issue in developing countries is gender discrimination (Pearson, 1995), regional diversity result in health inequality (Dong et al. Gender discrimination is the most critical issue that effect parental care-giving, especially in China. Male members can earn more money in compare to their female counterparts; thus, the rights of women within the household are misappropriated (Anker and Hein, 1985) even though many evidences show that women also contributed to the labor force. In addition, parental education has strong effect on child health, but the impact of maternal education is greater than the effect of father’s education (Peng et al.
China is considered the world’s most populated and the second largest developing country. As a result, the Chinese government faces many difficulties and challenges on its developing process. One of the first challenges for the Chinese government is to improve child health and woman health progress, which have 9 achieved more significant achievements over the past decades in China. The gap in infant and maternal mortality ratios between urban and rural areas is still large although these rates have been reduced to lower levels in recent years.
Looking at the case of Western China, the most important law in the West of China is that the qualities of the human population must always be increased. That is the reason the Chinese authorities distributes teaching role and management for each level based on a hierarchical network of maternal and child health services. The second development challenge for China is the unbalanced gender ratio and inequality household income. In China, the number of women employed in fulltime jobs could be limited because the employers prefer male employees than by women (due to their child-care obligations).
Many rural Chinese households are stem families, in which three generations live under the same roof. The adult-to-child ratio in these families is quite large since Chinese birth control policies in the past limit the number of children for each couple to one. In addition, gender discrimination is one of the the most critical issues in urban China (Feng et al. The larger the size of the production market, the more competitive between firms to attain skilled and experienced workers.
A greater number of private and collective firms instead of state-owned firms indicates a greater population of companies competing with one another for resources. As the result, labor markets will be more developed in regions and localities that have more developed commodity and production markets. It could be argued that labor markets for non-agricultural work are simply a functional level of industrialization, since in the absence of industry the only source of employment for rural people is agriculture and small-scale commerce. As a result, the Chinese society created the household income inequality.
Research objective This dissertation focuses on analyzing the influence of the level of women education (mother) on child health, with controlling the effect of economic growth, household wealth and father’s educational level as well as heredity factors and children gender. Consequently, the main objectives are considered consist of: 10 First, analyzing the relation between body mass index of both children and their parent and parent’s education level. Second, estimating the household wealth association with child health. Third, evaluating how the influence of gender discrimination as well as economy of living area.
Scope of the study The thesis analyses the interaction between mother’s education and child health, which is measured by the children’s body mass index (BMI) is calculated by the ratio of height of age and the weight of age. Moreover, the study controls external factors consist of environment, household income, the educational father, heredity factors, age and gender of children. The research in term of 25 provinces in China in 2014. Contributions The role of maternal education in child health is the important empirical results.
The study uses China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) data while the lack of papers used that data set. The thesis is the first study to estimate the effect of maternal education on child health using quantile regression. A number of recent researches examined those influence by multilevel modelling (Boyle et al., 2006), fixed-effect and random-effect (Desai and Alva, 1998).