 |
The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
|
The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Mona Sur, PhD, South Asia Rural Development Unit, The World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433 and James M. Nonnemaker, PhD, Health, Social and Economics Research, RTI International, 3040 Cornwallis Road, PO Box 12194, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, 919-541-7064, msur@worldbank.org.
Previous research (Efroymson et al., 2001) hypothesizes that the poorest households in Bangladesh, amongst whom malnutrition is widespread, would benefit significantly by shifting their tobacco expenditures to food. This paper tries to quantify the magnitude of these benefits in terms of improved child nutritional and health outcomes. This study estimates the impact of the price of tobacco products on child health and nutritional outcomes by estimating health demand functions for preschoolers aged 2-5 years. The data used for the analysis comes from a household survey conducted in rural Bangladesh between June, 1996 and September, 1997 by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, and the Institute of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Dhaka. Households were visited on four separate occasions providing us with panel data on household food and non-food expenditures, as well as individual food intakes, anthropometrics, and morbidity for residents of 956 rural households. The variables in the health demand functions include community prices of tobacco products, food prices, maternal and child-specific characteristics, estimates of cost of health services, and measures of the community health infrastructure and environment. The health demand functions are estimated using several dependent variables including height for age, weight for height, and self-reported illness days. These alternative specifications of the health demand function allow us to separately examine the impact of tobacco prices on chronic versus acute malnutrition and on short-term morbidity.
Learning Objectives: At the end of this session, the learner in this session will be able to
Keywords: Child Health, Tobacco
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.