TITLE:
Responsiveness of Child Health to Maternal Fertility in Central African Republic
AUTHORS:
Loic Molambo Sambi, Francis Menjo Baye
KEYWORDS:
Maternal Fertility, Child Health, Control Function Modeling, MICS, CAR
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.10,
September
29,
2022
ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the effect of fertility on
child health status, using data from the sixth edition of the Multiple
Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS6) of the Central African Republic (CAR)
collected in 2018 by the government’s statistics office. Specifically, the
paper seeks: to assess the direct and indirect effects of maternal fertility on
child health. To achieve these objectives, we use a framework based on the
quantity-quality theory of the new household economy and the control function
modeling strategy—which simultaneously corrects for endogeneity, sample selectivity and unobserved
heterogeneity biases. Results show that, having an additional child significantly
increases the risk of sickness in children under 5 years in CAR. Results also show a positive and highly significant
indirect effect of fertility on sickness as depicted by the interaction of fertility and its residual—a clear
indication of undesirable complementarities between
fertility and unobserved correlates of fertility in widening sickness probability among
children. These findings suggest that public intervention that improves spending on social services, such as
education, preventive child health and family planning programmes, would reduce fertility, and initiate the process of better child health and
productivity in adulthood.