Maternity support and child health: Unintended gendered effects

Abstract

This paper evaluates a maternity support conditional cash transfer (CCT) scheme, launched in October 2011, on short and long-run health outcomes of children in India. We estimate intent-to-treat effects of the program by exploiting a natural experiment arising from select geographical implementation and the eligibility of program benefits for first/second born children using the National Family Health Survey-4 data. We find an increase in birth weight, duration of breastfeeding and long term weight-forage, with a larger impact on male children. The effects are positive for height-for-age and negative for infant mortality, albeit insignificant, and significantly negative for neonatal mortality but only over a longer time period. These results are in contrast to the existing two studies in the nascent literature, which in the context of limited availability of healthcare services, find no effect of maternity support CCTs on child health outcomes. Thus, our findings show that institutional factors that ensure access to local health infrastructure for meeting the imposed conditionalities are important for the success of maternal CCT schemes.