Measuring Child Health Status Using Alternative Wealth Indices in India

Abstract

Disparities in child health between and within countries have persisted and augmented impressively amid the most recent couple of decades. The reduction of these disparities is a key objective of most developing countries’ public health policies, as illustrated in the MDGs 2015. Research on the impacts of socio-economic well being on health is essential for policy makers in developing countries, where limited resources make it critical to utilize existing health care resources to the best preference. The two direct economic measures have been used, namely household income and consumption expenditure. The wealth index is taken as a proxy for consumption expenditure, which tends to have an urban bias. The objective of this paper is to develop and test the need of alternative wealth indices for predicting child health status in India, a developing economy, with assistance of data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) fielded in India. It will underline the importance of going beyond the purely economic view of Socio-Economic Status to cover the multidimensional as well as multilevel concept of economic and social inequality. This study will demonstrate the need for using alternative wealth indices for rural and urban areas. Also, the objective of the paper is to examine whether child health estimates differ with the use of two alternative wealth indices, that is, a single wealth index for the total population at national level and two separate wealth indices for rural and urban areas.