The impact of India's JSY conditional cash transfer programme: a replication study
3ie Replication Paper 6, 2015
Natalie Carvalho and Slawa Rokicki
Abstract
Conditional cash transfer programmes are becoming
increasingly popular in low- and middle- income countries, with the goal of
improving access to health and social services and reducing inequities in
access and outcomes for the poor and marginalised. India’s conditional cash
transfer programme, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), established in 2005, is one
of the largest such programmes in the world. Along with small payments to community
health workers, it provides financial incentives to pregnant women to encourage
them to deliver in health facilities. Lim et al.’s Lancet article, ‘India’s Janani
Suraksha Yojana, a conditional cash transfer programme to increase births in
health facilities: an impact evaluation’ (2010), was the first formal statistical
impact evaluation of the programme across the whole of India. This replication
study, through robustness checks and additional model specifications, re-examines
this recent work on the effect of financial incentives for women through the programme
on reproductive health coverage indicators and perinatal and neonatal mortality.
Of three analytic approaches taken by Lim et al. (2010), this replication focused
on exact matching analysis, using data from round three of India’s district-level
household survey (DLHS-3). We found the original authors’ results to be
replicable and robust to various changes in model specifications and analysis.
We were able to replicate quite closely the national and subnational results
reported by Lim et al. We conducted several additional analyses as robustness
checks including alternative matching estimators, analyses to account for
differential implementation of the programme and random effects models to
examine state-level heterogeneity in results. We found meaningful heterogeneity
across states and districts in the effects of JSY on reproductive health
coverage indicators and mortality outcomes. Accounting for state-and district- level
heterogeneity has important implications for understanding the effectiveness of
this programme.
Keywords: replication study, conditional cash
transfers, maternal health, neonatal mortality, skilled birth attendance
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