Impact Of Safe Water On Children’s Health In Rural China

Safe water is vital to children’s physical health. Previous studies seldom use safe water as research topic related to children’s health for deep-going research. Based on the achievement in the past, this article describes children’s health situation and the children’s health inequality between urban and rural areas. After reviewing the theories about children health and combing the impact of safe water on children’s health at home and abroad, based on existing divarications, the author puts forward personal opinion. Second, based on the data of China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) from 2000 to 2011, this research uses the method of propensity score matching (PSM) to explore the impact of safe water on rural children’s health, and then analysis the safe water’s health effect by the perspective of overview, regional level, income level, and mother’s education level. Final, according to empirical results, this article puts forward some policy implications.The main conclusions are as follows:(1) The rural children’s health condition is consistent with the change tendency of analyzed data from nationally survey in China. Adopting HAZ-score, BAZ-score, four-week prevalence rate and sick days as the indicator of health, this paper finds that the children’s condition of growth, nutrition and health is improving continually, while the four-week prevalence rate and sick days is increasing. Children’s health inequality exists between regions and the health condition gap from east to west is obviously.(2) Using piped water as a measure for accessibility to safe water, data show that the proportion of rural household owns piped water is increasing, but the overall rate is still low. The proportion gap between provinces and regions is becoming larger gradually, as the highest one is about 83 precent higher than that of the lowest.(3) By comparing the 4 indexes which reflect children’s health condition between the household with and without piped water, this research finds that the children with piped water are healthier. The difference of basic characters between the household with and without piped water is also significant, household with piped water is more likely to be rich and have a better education background.(4) Building up the propensity score model and using the nearest neighbor matching method, the radius matching method and kernel matching, the empirical results show that:Based on consistent characteristic conditions of children sample, piped water decreases children’s four-week prevalence rate by 2.5% at most, and decreases children’s sick days by 0.132 day, increases children’s HAZ-score by 0.104 and children’s BAZ-score by 0.122 at least.(5) Based on above analysis, we can draw the following conclusions by the perspective of different ages level, gender level, income level and mother’s education level:the improvement from piped water to children’s health is varied with different ages and gender level, and the improvement will be increased as the piped water coverage promotes, income levels increase and mother’s education level gets better.This paper has the following three main contributions:First, analysis the impact of rural household’s safe water on children’s health separately. Second, select national sampling survey data and use multiple health indicators, reducing existed bias about scattered regionalization, inaccuracy of health indicators and monotonous research angle. In the end, this article uses propensity score matching to analyze the direct impacts of safe water to children’s health by the perspective of regional level, income level and mother’s education level, minimizing endogeneity and multicollinearity bias, compensating for the weakness of previous research.