Is household shock a boon or bane to the utilisation of preventive healthcare for children? Evidence from Uganda

A stylised fact in the development literature is that resource-constrained households in low-income countries invest very little in preventive healthcare. This paper investigates how the households trade off investment in their children's preventive healthcare during idiosyncratic shocks when resources are even more limited. By using the incidence of flood or drought as a proxy for negative income shock, and illness of any household member as an indicator for negative health shock, I examine the shocks’ effects on the intake of Vitamin A Supplementation (VAS) by children. With four waves of panel data from the Uganda National Panel Survey, results from a household fixed effects analysis show that children under two years of age are significantly more likely to get VAS as a part of their immunisation schedule when the household is under health or income shock. Further investigation shows that this effect of health shock results from the increase in average time spent outside the labour market by the household adults due to illness. On the contrary, an income shock has a positive effect on the average time spent in the labour market. However, a negative interaction effect of the income shock with the household wealth level implies that the relatively wealthier households could be substituting labour hours with the otherwise time-intensive preventive healthcare activities, thus increasing the VAS uptake.