The Impact on Child Health from Access to Water and Sanitation and Other Socioeconomic Factors

In this paper we examine the impacts on child health, using diarrhoe as the health outcome (amongst children living in households), with access to different types of water and sanitation facilities, and from other socio-econoic and child specific factors. Using cross-sectional health survey data for India, we employ the propensity score method to match children belonging to different treatment groups, defined by water types and sanitation facilities, with children in a control group. We also employ non-matching techniques to compare our results and to check for their robustness. Our results indicate that disease-specific awareness has strong marginal effects on reducing the predicted probabilities of diarrhoeal outcomes in young children, which are consistent across the models utilised. We also find disease-specific awareness to have the largest impact on reducing the burden of disease from diarrhoea across a select group of predictors.