Stony Brook University, USA.
Stony Brook University, USA.
Soc Sci Res. 2022 Jul;105:102697. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102697. Epub 2022 Jan 19.
The connection between women's education and infant mortality is one of the most consistent and powerful relationships established in public health. A large body of cross-national research highlights the benefits of women's access to education, especially for improving population health in developing countries. However, most of this literature assumes the relationship is uniform across cases. In this study, we revisit the education-health link using a distributional approach. To do so, we conduct a series of unconditional quantile regression analyses that estimate the impact of female secondary school enrollment on infant mortality rates across 153 countries from 1970 to 2016. This technique allows for the possibility that the relationship between education and health may vary across the distribution of mortality. Indeed, results show that the education advantage is distribution-specific. We find that the expected benefits of women's education are limited to the middle of the distribution where infant mortality rates range from about 11 to 55 deaths per 1000 live births. However, we find no significant effect where mortality is comparatively low or high. Both consistent with and contradictory to prior research, these findings provide a more nuanced picture of how women's access to education relates to global health inequalities.
妇女教育与婴儿死亡率之间的关系是公共卫生领域确立的最一致和最有力的关系之一。大量跨国研究强调了妇女获得教育的好处，特别是对改善发展中国家的人口健康。然而，大多数文献都假定这种关系在所有情况下都是一致的。在这项研究中，我们使用分布方法重新审视了教育与健康之间的联系。为此，我们进行了一系列无条件分位数回归分析，这些分析估计了 1970 年至 2016 年间 153 个国家女性中学入学率对婴儿死亡率的影响。这种技术使教育与健康之间的关系可能因死亡率的分布而有所不同成为可能。事实上，结果表明，教育的优势是特定于分布的。我们发现，女性教育的预期收益仅限于死亡率在每 1000 例活产中约为 11 至 55 例的分布中间。然而，我们在死亡率相对较低或较高的地方没有发现显著的影响。这些发现与先前的研究一致或矛盾，为我们提供了一个更细致的画面，说明妇女获得教育与全球健康不平等之间的关系。
