Child Health, Household Income and the Local Public Provision of Health Care in Brazil

There is evidence in the economic literature that household income has a positive impact on child’s health. One of the mechanisms through which income can affect health is the affordability of medical care. In this way, public provision of health care might play an important role in the health status of children in poorer household. The goal of this paper is to investigate the impacts of income and the local provision of public health care on children’s health in Brazil. The distribution of income is extremely unequal in Brazil, and there is a large share of children living below poverty line. On the other hand, the Unified Health System (SUS), which is the Brazilian National Health System, is designed to provide universal health insurance coverage to the whole population. It could be an important element in narrowing down the gap in health status over the country. Using data from 2003 PNAD (Brazilian National Household Survey) and DataSUS, the empirical analysis shows that household income and the public provision of health care improve child’s health in a significant way. Public care presents a positive impact on health status among poorer children but not among the richest ones, even though the higher income provides much better health for the latter group. JEL classification: I10, I18