Impact of sanitation, safe drinking water and health expenditure on infant mortality rate in developing economies

Abstract

Despite of significant growth in all walks of life, the issue of infant mortality still a major concern in most of the developing economies. The World Development Indicators have reported that 4.45 million infants died across the globe in 2015, meaning that 32 deaths per every 1,000 live births. A number of times, the World Health Organization (WHO) have stressed the significance of sanitation, safe drinking water and healthcare facilities in reducing infant mortality rate, though most developing countries still lacks in these services. Given this background, the present study aims to examine the role of sanitation, water facilities and health expenditure on infant mortality rate across a panel of 84 developing economies using annual data from 1995 to 2013. The study also account for per capita income and depth of food deficiency as the control factors in the model. The findings of this study establish a significant long‐run equilibrium association among the variables. The long‐run elasticities on infant mortality suggest that improved water and sanitation facilities, health expenditure and per capita income substantially reduce infant mortality rate, while food deficiency increases. Given these findings, we suggest that increasing access to improved water, sanitation and healthcare facilities will significantly reduce child mortality in developing economies around the world.

The Effect of Health Expenditure and Immunisation on Under-Five Mortality Rate in Selected African Countries.

“…This shows that a 1 percent unit increase in government health spending will reduce under-ve mortality rate by -0.128 if other variables are held constant. The nding is consistent with some previous studies [ 22,4,8,6,11,21]. However, it is at variance with a study involving some high income countries where no signi cant relationship was found between public health spending and child mortality [10].…”

“…Similarly, when other variables remain unchanged, a unit increase in domestic private health expenditure will lead to an increase of 0.002 in under-ve mortality rate per time. While the nding is in agreement with a couple of studies conducted in the previous years [4,22], it is however, in contrast to some other studies [26,2]. Moreover, the study found that external health expenditure had a signi cant negative effect on under-ve mortality rate for the period under review.…”

“…Some of these studies used data from time series in the health economics literature, while others used panel data sets. A study found a signi cant long-term association between government spending on health and child mortality in several developing countries [22]. Similarly, several different but related study results found that government spending on health was signi cantly associated with decreasing child mortality [4,8,6,11,21].…”

“…This encompasses household out-of pocket, funds from corporations and non-governmental organisations. A group of authors has noted that DPHE had a signi cant in uence on under-ve mortality [22]. That is, private expenditure on health reduced child mortality signi cantly.…”

“…The analysis of data was facilitated by the application of STATA 12 software version and the study hypotheses were extrapolated from the results and tested at the pre-determined 5% level of signi cance. The analysis was patterned after the econometric styles used in the literature[4, 8,22,21]. Moreover, to ensure the validity of the results, several robustness tests were conducted to check for multicollinearity, heteroskedasticity, data normality and model speci cation.…”