A Study on the impact of access to piped water on child diarrhea in the Philippines

• Main Authors: Barretto, Patricia Louise P., Lim, Karen Lou C., Pavon, Tiffany Esmeralda T., Yu, Racel G.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2013
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/10968
• Institution: De La Salle University

Water is vital to maintaining good health and sustaining life. Different organizations have been promoting programs to improve access to safe water. In fact, one of the Millennium Development Goals set by the Unite Nations is to decrease, by half, the number of people without access to safe water and sanitation. However, the lack of access to safe drinking water remains to be a critical problem in developing countries like the Philippines as it results to sicknesses and deaths, especifically of children. As such, this paper studies how access to piped water affects child health to establish the causality between the two variables and provide policy implications regarding the funding of water projects in the Philippines despite the numerous problems surrounding the country. Using NDHS 2008, propensity score was estimated and the four matching techniques were employed - nearest neighbor matching, radius matching, kernel matching ad stratified matching. The results show that the average treatment effect of the treated is 1.4% to 1.6% decrease in child diarrhea for households with piped water. ATT was found robust after conducting a sensitivity analysis, therefore the result is reliable. This result might seem trivial, but looking at it in the macroeconomics point of view, multiplying the 1.4% reduction over the millions of households in the Philippines, lowering diarrhea cases in children nationwide help form productive and healthy human capital resources.