Suchergebnisse

In the 1990s, the Indonesian government placed over 50,000 midwives in communities throughout the country. We examine how this expansion in health services affected children's height- for-age. To address the problem that midwives were not randomly allocated to communities, the estimation exploits the biology of childhood growth, the timing of the introduction of midwives to communities, and rich longitudinal data. The evidence indicates that the nutritional status of children fully exposed to a midwife during early childhood is significantly better than that of their peers of the same age and cohort in communities without a midwife. These children are also better off than children measured at the same age from the same communities, but who were born before the midwife arrived. Within communities, the improvement in nutritional status across cohorts is greater where midwives were introduced than where they were not. This result is robust to the inclusion of community fixed-effects.

In the late 1990s, most Southeast Asian countries experienced substantial economic downturns that reduced social‐sector spending and decreased individuals' spending power. Data from Indonesia were collected in 1997 (just before the crisis) and in 1998 (during the crisis) that are used in this study to examine changes in the contraceptive supply environment and in women's choices regarding contraceptive use. Despite substantial changes in providers' characteristics during the first year of the crisis, no statistically significant differences are found between 1997 and 1998 in overall levels of prevalence, in unmet need, or in method mix. Women's choices regarding source of contraceptive supplies, however, changed considerably over the period. Changes in the contraceptive supply environment are linked here to changes in women's choice of source of supply, and a number of providers' characteristics are found to be significantly associated with women's choices in this regard.

Indonesian women's power relative to that of their husbands is examined to determine how it affects use of prenatal and delivery care. Holding household resources constant, a woman's control over economic resources affects the couple's decisionmaking. Compared with a woman with no assets that she perceives as being her own, a woman with some share of household assets influences reproductive health decisions. Evidence suggests that her influence on service use also varies if a woman is better educated than her husband, comes from a background of higher social status than her husband's, or if her father is better educated than her father‐in‐law. Therefore, both economic and social dimensions of the distribution of power between spouses influence use of services, and conceptualizing power as multidimensional is useful for understanding couples' behavior.

AbstractThis paper uses panel data from two rounds of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS1 and IFLS2) to examine the correlates of shared living arrangements between adult children and older parents. We consider the question from two perspectives: that of prime-age adults (under 60) and that of elderly (60 and above). For both groups, we find that opportunities to co-reside are strong determinants of whether coresidence occurs in 1993. That is, for prime-age adults, the number of living siblings is strongly negatively associated with the presence of a parent in the household. For the elderly, the number of living children is strongly positively associated with whether a child is present in the household. Households headed by elderly respondents are also more likely to contain a child if they are in urban areas or in areas where housing costs are relatively high. We also examine the correlates of the transition to shared living arrangements by 1997. For the elderly, although socioeconomic factors play a role in coresidence in 1993, they are not related to a transition to coresidence by 1997. Among prime-age adults, it is the younger and better educated household heads who are more likely to transition to coresidence by 1997, but these factors do not explain coresidence in 1993.