Researchers from University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi (NCAER) propose to collect a second wave of an all India panel study originally fielded in 1994 by the NCAER. These panel surveys will be publicly available to Indian as well as international scholars and will become a premiere data source for studying fertility and family planning, school enrollment, labor force behavior, family demography and aging. Cultural, social and economic variation in India, captured during a period of rapid social change, will allow scholars to test a variety of theories. For the present project, these surveys of approximately 40,000 households will enable us to study how the interplay between poverty, gender, and public policy determine morbidity, mortality, and access to quality health care. Poverty, gender, and public policy are three principal dimensions along which maternal and child health is hypothesized to rise and fall in most developing countries, however, research which empirically examines this link has been limited in scope. India is an especially favorable location to study each of these forces because of the great variations across regions and time in each of these dimensions. This is also an opportune time to study health outcomes in India due to significant policy changes between the time of the first and the second surveys including decentralization of health services, abolition of contraceptive targets and changes in food distribution systems. The second wave of the household survey will replicate earlier measures of morbidity, anthropometry, and mortality as the principal health outcomes. Survival or cause of death of all household members from the first wave will permit more reliable mortality analyses in the panel. Survey sections on immunizations, antenatal care, health expenditures, and type of medical and maternity care will be repeated and expanded to measure the proximate sources of health outcomes. Combined with extensive household-level measures of income, consumption, assets, employment, education and gender relation, these data will be invaluable to research on health outcomes, health seeking behavior, and health policy.
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