Department of Economics School of Social Sciences Identifying the effect of public health program on child immunisation in rural Bangladesh

Using unit-level data from Matlab villages in rural Bangladesh, this paper examines the impact of an exogenously assigned health care intervention– Maternal and Child Health (MCH) program– on children’s immunisation status. In particular, we investigate how the program effect interacts with two key determinants of household immunisation choice, namely maternal education and risk perception of households. Results show that the MCH program has significantly enhanced immunisation status of children. In addition to directly improving immunisation demand, the MCH program also acts as a substitute for maternal education and compensates households for low access to public health information. Yet the MCH intervention does not have any influence on the household’s risk awareness and perception towards child health. On the contrary, prenatal-care visits and tetanus toxoid immunisation by pregnant mothers, services which are provided by government health facilities, have independent effects on the household’s demand for childhood immunisation. This suggests that the role of government health facilities cannot be ignored even in the presence of a very effective MCH program.