The effect of vaccination on children's physical and cognitive development in the Philippines

Abstract

We use data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS) in the Philippines to link vaccination in the first 2 years of life with later physical and cognitive development in children. We use propensity score matching to estimate the causal effect of vaccination on child development. We find no effect of vaccination on later height or weight, but full childhood vaccination for measles, polio, Tuberculosis (TB), Diphtheria, Pertussis and Tetanus (DPT) significantly increases cognitive test scores relative to matched children who received no vaccinations. The size of the effect is large, raising test scores, on average, by about half an SD.

Keywords:

• vaccination
• education
• health
• human capital
• matching

JEL Classification::

• I12
• J24

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. They also received helpful comments from David Bishai and Sacha Canning on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

¹ In this study, we concentrate on the benefits of vaccination conditional on survival to the follow-up survey, this allows our effects to be regarded as additional to the mortality reduction effects.

² Exploratory investigations along these lines revealed that measles vaccination was the most important for our result.