What drives child health improvements in Indonesian households? A micro-level perspective on complementarities in MDG achievements

Using panel data from Indonesia, this paper analyzes the linkages between child nutrition, health care, household wealth and parental education in order to detect transmission channels between health, education, nutrition, water and sanitation access, five critical MDG targets. This paper therefore also aims at providing an empirical analysis of the drivers of complementarities between these goals at the micro level micro-level perspective. We find that maternal education has a positive and long term effect on child health and that this effect is partly reflected in reproductive behavior and partly conveyed to child health outcomes through child caring practices such as breastfeeding. Although we cannot rule out the existence of strong complementarities existing between household wealth or income and child health, the effect of positive changes in this variable appears to be present only in the short term. On the other hand, there are supply-side factors such as lack of sanitation and access to health facilities which also strongly affect children in terms of anthropometric outcomes.