Three Papers on Health and Development in China After the Economic Reforms

This dissertation comprises three papers on health and development in China after the economic reforms initiated in early 1980s. The first paper analyzes the relationship between income inequality and health and provides some evidence that income inequality negatively affects population health. The second paper looks at determinants of children's height and shows that a group of individual, household and community factors all play important roles in determining Chinese children's health in the 1990s. The third paper investigates the under-nutrition situation in China along with intra-household inequality. A U-shape relationship is found between intra-household inequality and average household well being, which implies important policy applications. All three papers use the China Health and Nutrition Survey data. In the first paper, nonparametric techniques are used and a multi-level regression model is applied to analyze data from nine provinces included in the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) collected in 1991, 1993, 1997 and 2000. The analyses show an independent effect of income inequality on self-reported health after adjusting for individual and household variables. We conclude that in China, societal income inequality appears to be an important determinant of population health during 1991-2000. The second paper uses longitudinal data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey in the 1990s to study children's height and its socioeconomic determinants. The cohort in the CHNS shows low scores of height compared to the same age/sex child in the reference. Through the survey years, there are decreased inequalities in height between rural and urban, and between male and female children. A dynamic model is used to observe the effect of past height on current height and is found better in finding the impacts of time-varying variables than a static model, which downplays the importance of time varying variables and over-emphasizes the importance of time-invariant variables. A group of individual, household and community factors are found important for children's height in China. The last paper finds large scale under-nutrition in the CHNS data from 1991 to 2000 using calorie intake information, as well as nutritional inequalities among various demographic groups. In the analysis of the individual-level data, we find the existence of intra-household inequality in terms of calorie intake. A U-shape relationship is discovered between intra-household inequality and average household well being. Targeting strategies are discussed with a focus on an upper-age-limit targeting scheme. In addition, the uses of individual level data and household level data are compared and the former is found to better analyzing intra-household inequality in China.

• http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/304867231?accountid=14244
• http://vb3lk7eb4t.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx;_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8𝔯_id=info:sid/ProQuest+Dissertations+%26+Theses+Full+Text&rft;_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft.genre;=dissertations+%26+theses&rft.jtitle;=&rft.atitle;=&rft.au;=Pei%2C+Xiaofei&rft.aulast;=Pei&rft.aufirst;=Xiaofei&rft.date;=2007-01-01&rft.volume;=&rft.issue;=&rft.spage;=&rft.isbn;=9780549348474&rft.btitle;=&rft.title;=Three+papers+on+health+and+development+in+China+after+the+economic+reforms&rft.issn;=