Education, Gender, and State-Level Disparities in the Health of Older Indians: Evidence from Biomarker Data

Education, Gender, and State-Level Disparities in the Health of Older Indians: Evidence from Biomarker Data

Economics & Human Biology, Volume 19, December 2015, Pages 145–156

Jinkook Lee, Mark E. McGovern, David E. Bloom, P. Arokiasamy, Arun Risbud, Jennifer O’Brien, Varsha Kale, Peifeng Hu

Abstract

Using new biomarker data from the 2010 pilot round of the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI), we investigate education, gender, and state-level disparities in health. We find that hemoglobin level, a marker for anemia, is lower for respondents with no schooling (0.7 g/dL less in the adjusted model) compared to those with some formal education and is also lower for females than for males (2.0 g/dL less in the adjusted model). In addition, we find that about one third of respondents in our sample aged 45 or older have high C-reaction protein (CRP) levels (>3 mg/L), an indicator of inflammation and a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. We find no evidence of educational or gender differences in CRP, but there are significant state-level disparities, with Kerala residents exhibiting the lowest CRP levels (a mean of 1.96 mg/L compared to 3.28 mg/L in Rajasthan, the state with the highest CRP). We use the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition approach to explain group-level differences, and find that state-level disparities in CRP are mainly due to heterogeneity in the association of the observed characteristics of respondents with CRP, rather than differences in the distribution of endowments across the sampled state populations.

Keywords: Biomarkers; Health disparities; Cardiovascular health; Anemia; Aging

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X15000660

A Less Controversial 3ie Replication Study: The Impact of India's JSY Conditional Cash Transfer Programme

The impact of India's JSY conditional cash transfer programme: a replication study

3ie Replication Paper 6, 2015

http://www.3ieimpact.org/publications/3ie-replication-paper-series/3ie-replication-paper-6/

 

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

What is the going rate for flipping burgers?

In the current edition of Princeton Weekly, there is an article about Professor Orley Ashenfelter, from the Department of Economics and Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. When faced with the question as to whether China’s and India’s growing economies will soon rival that of the United States, Ashenfelter poses the question: "What is the going rate for flipping burgers?"

He is conducting a study of McDonald’s employees’ wages in many countries to illustrate the relative strength of their economies, and early results indicate that developing nations still have a long climb. While the average hourly “McWage” is around $6 in the United States and other western nations, the same job in China, India and other developing countries pays less than 50 cents.