A variety of literature exists on birth spacing and malnutrition in developing countries as well as in Bangladeshi children, and different studies have used different ways to describe it. For example; Rutstein So (2005) considered the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from 17 developing countries to examine the association between birth intervals, infant and child mortality, and nutritional status. The key independent variable is the length of the preceding birth interval, measured by "the number of months between the birth of the child under study (index child) and the immediately preceding birth to the mother."(Health in Bangladesh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Bangladesh).
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(2000) considered infants and children aged between 6-39 months and tried to find the effect of the length of birth interval on them. Their study was based on two districts of Bangladesh named Sirajgonj and Gopalpur. They analyzed the data by cross tabulation and logistic regression. Their findings indicated that the chances of malnourished children rise with the reduction in birth intervals. Also, the proportion of malnourished children increased with the number of older surviving children. Also, maternal education, housing area, the gender of child and number of siblings, act as a causes for child …show more content…
Das Gupta and Bhat (1997) showed that in India falling fertility increases the bias against girls. Bhat and Zavier (2003) presented that preference for sons also declines with lower desired fertility. In South Asian countries some parents think having boys will give more social and financial advantages than having girls. As women are less in numbers in the workforce, a son is more likely having a source of income for the family. Moreover, if the first child is male, the parents tends to space out more whereas the birth interval is much lower if the child is female; as sons are socially counted as the inheritance of the family. Sometimes the death of an infant may lead to having another child in a more closely spaced time, which in the end causes the deleterious effect of that child’s health. Aparna Lhila in her paper ‘Birth Spacing and Siblings Health Inequality’ discussed these problems of endogeneity with respect to birth spacing and infant health and tried to overcome the problem. She used data from Malaysian Family life Survey-2 (MFLS-2) conducted in Peninsular Malaysia between August 1988 and January 1989. In her study, she employed the sex of the previous child and the number of surviving boys as instruments for prior birth spacing. This instrument is assumed to be correlated with birth spacing and at the same time, it is not correlated with other unobserved factors that affect
(2000) considered infants and children aged between 6-39 months and tried to find the effect of the length of birth interval on them. Their study was based on two districts of Bangladesh named Sirajgonj and Gopalpur. They analyzed the data by cross tabulation and logistic regression. Their findings indicated that the chances of malnourished children rise with the reduction in birth intervals. Also, the proportion of malnourished children increased with the number of older surviving children. Also, maternal education, housing area, the gender of child and number of siblings, act as a causes for child …show more content…
Das Gupta and Bhat (1997) showed that in India falling fertility increases the bias against girls. Bhat and Zavier (2003) presented that preference for sons also declines with lower desired fertility. In South Asian countries some parents think having boys will give more social and financial advantages than having girls. As women are less in numbers in the workforce, a son is more likely having a source of income for the family. Moreover, if the first child is male, the parents tends to space out more whereas the birth interval is much lower if the child is female; as sons are socially counted as the inheritance of the family. Sometimes the death of an infant may lead to having another child in a more closely spaced time, which in the end causes the deleterious effect of that child’s health. Aparna Lhila in her paper ‘Birth Spacing and Siblings Health Inequality’ discussed these problems of endogeneity with respect to birth spacing and infant health and tried to overcome the problem. She used data from Malaysian Family life Survey-2 (MFLS-2) conducted in Peninsular Malaysia between August 1988 and January 1989. In her study, she employed the sex of the previous child and the number of surviving boys as instruments for prior birth spacing. This instrument is assumed to be correlated with birth spacing and at the same time, it is not correlated with other unobserved factors that affect