Cash For Less Child Mortality Story May Neglect Health Care Supply Interventions

Craig Palsson of the YouTube channel Market Power briefly reviews the study showing reduced child mortality from cash transfer programs.

He highlights the main reduction in child mortality comes from the couple of weeks where mothers decide to use cash to give birth in more professional facilities. So more narrowly targeted cash transfers at this point could have a higher impact per dollar.

He also highlights that only doing a demand-push intervention, like cash for better birthing conditions, may not reduce overall child mortality as much if health care supply is constrained. And he describes how many countries have health care staff that are absent from clinics more than 30% of the time. So there may be opportunities to increase health care supply just by encouraging health care systems to work at currently expected / agreed upon levels.