Child Income Appropriations as a Disease-Coping Mechanism: Consequences for the Health-Education Relationship

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationships between HIV/AIDS and education taking into account the appropriative nature of child income. Using a theoretical model, we show that considering remittances from one’s child as an insurance asset can reverse the usual negative relationship between disease prevalence and educational investment. This prediction confirms the results of an empirical study conducted on data compiled from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) database for 12 sub-Sahara African countries for children aged between 7 and 22-years-old. Using regional HIV prevalence as a measure of health risk, we find that the ‘sign of the slope’ between health risk and the enrolment of children is not constant. Splitting the data based on expected remittance patterns (for example rural versus urban), we obtain that the effect is most likely driven by household characteristics related to child income appropriation.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank participants of the GREQAM Doctoral seminars and the DEFI Economic Development Seminars. A special thank you goes to Pr. Cecilia Garcia-Peñalosa, Pr. Pierre Phillipe Combes, and Pr. Alice Fabre. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of any of the affiliated institutes where the research was carried out. We are also grateful to the discussants and participants of the 16^th Theories and Methods in Economics conference in Nantes, France, The ECHE 2012 Conference held in Zurich, Switzerland and the 27^th EEA 2012 Conference held in Malaga, Spain as well as the 17^th SYME 2012 workshop held in Mannheim, Germany for helpful discussion and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental Material

Supplementary Materials are available for this article which can be accessed via the online version of this journal available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2016.1274393

Additional information

Funding

This work has been completed thanks to the support of the A*MIDEX project SANTEMED (n ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) funded by the « Investissements d’Avenir» French Government program, managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR)».