Globalization, Democracy and Child Health: Asia vs. Latin America

Abstract

Child mortality in an important indicator of shortcomings in health provisions to the most vulnerable segments of the society i.e., children under five. In this highly connected world, the trends in child mortality need exploration within the context of institutional change and global connectivity. This study explores the effect of globalization on child health in Asia and Latin America. These two regions over the last three decades have undergone waves of liberalization as well as an inconsistent drive towards democratization with very different outcomes in terms of child mortality, making for apt comparison in the context of this study. The study also examines how the level of democracy changes the relationship between globalization and child health in the two regions for the time-period 1970 to 2016 using System GMM estimation technique. The results indicate that economic globalization improves child health in Asia while social and political globalization show different results for infant and child mortality. In Latin America political globalization was found to be most effective in reducing infant mortality, while all dimensions of globalization were found to be either insignificant or increasing under-five mortality. That said, the interactions between dimensions of globalization and democracy were found to be consistently significant and mortality reducing. This result signifies the existence of complementarity between democracy and globalization in improving child health outcomes.