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Maternal Education and Infant Mortality Decline: The Evidence from Indonesia, 1980–2015

J. Jona Schellekens, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Better maternal education has been credited with making a major contribution to infant mortality decline. Most of the evidence is based on cross-sectional analyses, which show a strong correlation between maternal education and infant mortality. However, cross-sectional analyses do not provide an estimate of the contribution of maternal education to infant mortality decline. This study presents a more accurate estimate of the contribution of maternal education to infant mortality decline. Pooling data from all available phases of the Demographic and Health Survey, it presents a longitudinal individual-level analysis of the determinants of trends in infant mortality in Indonesia. The preliminary results show that better maternal education explains fifteen percent of the infant mortality decline in Indonesia from 1980 to 2015. This is the largest individual-level study of its kind, in terms of length of the period covered – 36 years – and number of cases – 101,890 infants – involved.

Keywords: Mortality, Longitudinal studies

See paper.

  Presented in Session 47. Mortality in Low- and Middle-Income Countries