Health aid, governance and infant mortality

The Centre for Health Economics (CHE) is hosting the seminar, ‘Health Aid, Governance and Infant Mortality’, with insights from Associate Professor Debdulal Mallick from Deakin University.

We investigate the impact of health aid on infant mortality conditional on the quality of governance in 96 recipient countries. Our analysis applies the long difference estimator and instrumental variable estimation, with aid instrumented by donor government fractionalization interacted with the probability of allocating health aid to a recipient nation. The effectiveness of health aid in reducing infant mortality is conditional on good governance (measured either as government effectiveness or control of corruption). Specifically, health aid to a recipient nation that experiences a one standard deviation improvement in government effectiveness reduces infant mortality by about 4 percent. Our findings reaffirm the importance of improving the quality of governance in recipient nations.

Debdulal Mallick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Deakin Business School. He completed his Bachelor of Social Science in Economics from the University of Dhaka, a Master in Economics from Delhi School of Economics and his PhD from Emory University. Debdulal's main areas of research are macroeconomics and development economics. He has published in journals including American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, European Economic Review, Macroeconomic Dynamics, The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, Journal of Macroeconomics, Labour Economics and World Development.

Visitors are welcome to attend – registration is not required.

We hope to see you there.