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Household expenditure and child health in Vietnam: analysis of longitudinal data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2021

Trong-Anh Trinh Open the ORCID record for Trong-Anh Trinh [Opens in a new window] ,
Preety Srivastava  and
Sarah Brown
Trong-Anh Trinh*
Affiliation:
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Preety Srivastava
Affiliation:
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Sarah Brown
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: tronganh.trinh@rmit.edu.au
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Abstract

While the relationship between socioeconomic status and child health has been studied extensively in developed countries, evidence is limited for developing countries. This study makes an important contribution by examining the relationship between child health and household socioeconomic status in Vietnam, using household expenditure as an alternative measure. This also allows us to explore the mechanisms via which income affects child health, in which household consumption arguably plays a crucial role. We employ different measures of health that allow us to examine both long-run and short-run effects, and two alternative instrumental variables, the unemployment rate and rainfall deviation, to address the potential endogeneity of household expenditure. We find evidence of a strong positive impact of household expenditure on child health and the findings are consistent across age groups. Specifically, a 10% increase in expenditure will result in a weight gain of 213–541 g in a “typical” child. We also explore the effect of a range of exogenous adverse economic shocks on children's health.

Keywords

BMIchild healthhousehold expendituresocioeconomic statusVietnam

JEL classification

C3: Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models • Multiple Variables I1: Health D1: Household Behavior and Family Economics
Type
Research Paper
Information
Journal of Demographic Economics , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 351 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain 2021

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