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Health Economics Review
Published in: Health Economics Review 1/2017

Open Access 01-12-2017 | Research

Does birth under-registration reduce childhood immunization? Evidence from the Dominican Republic

Authors: Steve Brito, Ana Corbacho, Rene Osorio

Published in: Health Economics Review | Issue 1/2017

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Abstract

The consequences of lacking birth certificates remain largely unexplored in the economic literature. We intend to fill this knowledge gap studying the effect of lacking birth certificates on immunization of children in the Dominican Republic. This is an interesting country because a significant number of children of Haitian descent face the consequences of lacking proper documentation. We use the distance to the civil registry office and the mother’s document of identification as instrumental variables of the child’s birth certificate. After controlling for distance to immunization services and other determinants, this paper finds that children between 0 and 59 months of age that do not have birth certificates are behind by nearly one vaccine (out of a total of nine) compared to those that have birth certificates.
Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
The DHS was not designed to study legal identity issues. Fortunately for the Dominican Republic, the 2006 ENHOGAR household survey asked about birth certificates. This provided a secondary and independent source of data to cross-check the accuracy of birth registration rates in the DHS. We were able to confirm that birth registration rates in both datasets coincide, being 22 percent for children under the age of 5.
 
2
Health centers may not coincide with immunization centers, but they may serve as a proxy for the actual location of immunization centers, as they generally include a unit devoted to immunizations.
 
3
The DHS contains a random error in the position of the cluster of households. This is done to protect the confidentiality of the household members. See http://​dhsprogram.​com/​faq.​cfm for more details.
 
4
We used the treatreg command in STATA.
 
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Metadata
Title
Does birth under-registration reduce childhood immunization? Evidence from the Dominican Republic
Authors
Steve Brito
Ana Corbacho
Rene Osorio
Publication date
01-12-2017
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
Health Economics Review / Issue 1/2017
Electronic ISSN: 2191-1991
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13561-017-0149-3

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