With about five children born per woman and a population growth rate of 2.5 per cent per year, sub-Saharan Africa has been the world's fastest growing region over the last decade. Economists have often argued that high fertility rates are mainly driven by women's demand for children (and not by...

Poverty and inequality persist in many dimensions in the developing world. In order to understand the determinants of poverty and its distribution between and within countries, it is necessary to know its dimensions and the channels through which poverty and inequality affect human well-being....

This paper combines 172 Demography and Health Survey data sets from 70 countries to estimate the effect of water and sanitation on child mortality and morbidity. The results show a robust association between access to water and sanitation technologies and both child morbidity and child...

Using changes in the possession of household assets over the past 20 years, several recent papers have argued that economic performance in Arica was substantially better than suggested by national income data and income poverty statistics, who suffer from well-known weaknesses. We scrutinize...

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We...

Children living in HIV/AIDS affected households bear the heaviest burden of the epidemic. Besides direct vertical transmission, HIV/ AIDS potentially worsens the children's welfare indirectly through its socio-economic impact. This paper uses household survey data including information about...