Explaining the rural-urban gap in infant mortality in India

Saikia, Nandita; Singh, Abhishek; Jasilionis, Domantas; Ram, Faujdar

doi:10.4054/demres.2013.29.18

Cited by 66 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…It is also observed that the OLS model overestimates the coefficients; hence, the spatial error and lag models will be better for capturing the spatial effect in the model. Model 1 (household amenities), for both spatial error and lag models, indicates that the risk of infant death is lower for the districts with higher urban household (higher levels of urbanization), which is consistent with the findings of the earlier studies (Saikia et al 2013) discussing urban-rural mortality divide. Similarly, we have found that districts with the higher proportion of households in the bottom wealth quintile were characterized by high IMR for both spatial regression models.…”

Section: Spatial Regressions and Diagnosticssupporting

confidence: 81%

Spatial clustering and risk factors of infant mortality: district-level assessment of high-focus states in India

Gupta

Ladusingh

Borkotoky

2016

Genus

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The study analyzes the spatial clustering and risk factors of infant mortality across high-focus states of India, using the Annual Health Survey (2010-2011), Census of India (2011), and District Level Household and Facility Survey-3 (2007-2008. Research has found substantial spatial autocorrelation across the districts and identified the "hot spots" characterized by higher infant mortality rate (IMR) in the districts of the central region (Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) of India. This study has considered several theoretical perspectives and implements a series of spatial regression models that allows accounting for household amenities and mother/child and health facility variables to determine the key risk factors of infant mortality. Our empirical analysis underscores the importance of the infrastructure of the health facility in improving the infant mortality scenario of the districts. The regression results show that the districts with a higher proportion of 24-h functioning primary healthcare centers have overall less infant mortality. In addition, the absence of drinking water from a treated source, unavailability of toilet facilities, and higher proportion of people in the bottom wealth quintile in the household were adversely associated with the IMR. In conclusion, reduction of infant mortality would be possible only if area-specific measures would be adopted on those clusters of districts where infant mortality is high irrespective of the state they belong to.

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Section: Spatial Regressions and Diagnosticssupporting

confidence: 81%

Spatial clustering and risk factors of infant mortality: district-level assessment of high-focus states in India

Gupta

Ladusingh

Borkotoky

2016

Genus

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“…Assessing global trends in the urban-rural divide is an essential topic of research in economics and demography, as almost everywhere in the world living standards of urban areas remain superior to those in rural areas [43]. Such divide can be observed across several different socioeconomic dimensions, ranging from per capita income to child mortality rates, persisting even as countries develop into industrialized economies, as demonstrated by the cases of China and India [44,47]. Historical trends in development, which tend to benefit those in already privileged positions, have resulted in, for example, technological disparities in terms of internet access and technological literacy -trends which ongoing rural development policies attempt to address [17,36].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facebook Ads as a Demographic Tool to Measure the Urban-Rural Divide

Rama

Mejova

Tizzoni

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2020

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In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging to track important statistics concerning this sparse, geographically dispersed population, resulting in a lack of reliable, up-to-date data. In this study, we examine the usefulness of the Facebook Advertising platform, which offers a digital "census" of over two billions of its users, in measuring potential rural-urban inequalities. We focus on Italy, a country where about 30% of the population lives in rural areas. First, we show that the population statistics that Facebook produces suffer from instability across time and incomplete coverage of sparsely populated municipalities. To overcome such limitation, we propose an alternative methodology for estimating Facebook Ads audiences that nearly triples the coverage of the rural municipalities from 19% to 55% and makes feasible fine-grained sub-population analysis. Using official national census data, we evaluate our approach and confirm known significant urban-rural divides in terms of educational attainment and income. Extending the analysis to Facebook-specific user "interests" and behaviors, we provide further insights on the divide, for instance, finding that rural areas show a higher interest in gambling. Notably, we find that the most predictive features of income in rural areas differ from those for urban centres, suggesting researchers need to consider a broader range of attributes when examining rural wellbeing. The findings of this study illustrate the necessity of improving existing tools and methodologies to include under-represented populations in digital demographic studies -the failure to do so could result in misleading observations, conclusions, and most importantly, policies.

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“…Although several studies have examined the pattern and determinants of infant mortality in India, systematic attempts to understand the factors that explain the regional variations in infant mortality are limited, except the recent work by Saikia et al. () which finds that household wealth and maternal education are the two most important factors in explaining the rural–urban gap in infant mortality. But there are several studies in international context that have examined the regional variations in IMR and the role of education (largely parental education) in it (Ware ; Wang ; Basu & Stephenson ; Mondal et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…; Papageorgiou & Stoytcheva ; Saikia et al. ), and there is very little investigation on the impact of father's education and the combined education of the parents on it. Also, there is hardly any attempt to understand the effect of mother's exposure to mass media and her socio‐economic empowerment (that are closely linked with the education) on infant mortality at the regional level in India.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%