Essays on Health Inequality in Low- and Middle-income Countries in Asia

The main objectives of this PhD thesis are to investigate health inequality in low- and middle-income countries in Asia. The thesis consists of four independent chapters. The first two chapters explore the inequality of opportunity in health and the last two chapters evaluate the conditional cash transfer programmes. Chapter 1 explores the inequality of opportunity in child health in ten developing countries in Asia, i.e. Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives, India, Cambodia, Myanmar, East Timor, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. We quantify the degree of inequality in child nutritional status between children with advantaged parental socio-economic backgrounds and those with disadvantaged parental socio-economic backgrounds. We then investigate the factors contributing to the observed disparities. The results provide strong evidence that priority should be given to protecting children from marginalised households in order to mitigate the inequality in child health. Chapter 2 proposes a new approach to measuring the inequality of opportunity with copulas to overcome some of the shortcomings of the existing methods. The proposed approach is applied to the inequality in body mass associated with its intergenerational transmission from parents to children in Indonesia. Chapter 3 evaluates the conditional cash transfer programme in Indonesia, the Program Keluarga Harapan (PKH). We estimate its impacts on the entire distributions of child health and household expenditure. We explore the mechanism by which the PKH affects child nutritional status by decomposing the treatment effect on health into the part that can be explained by the change in household expenditure and the remaining part that is due to behavioural changes. An improvement in height among children aged 24-36 months is observed. Its improvement is explained not by the increase in household expenditure but by the behavioural changes of the beneficiaries. Chapter 4 re-visits the conditional cash transfer programme in India, the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) and examines the existing non-experimental evidence of its impact on maternal healthcare use through the partial identification approach. We find that the average treatment effects estimated in the previous studies are outside of the average treatment effect bounds estimated under weaker but more credible assumptions, thereby suggesting that average treatment effect in previous studies may have been over- or under-estimated due to untenable identification assumptions.