Abstract
About 40%, 15%, and 38% of children in Bangladesh are stunted, wasted, and underweight, respectively. This paper explores the causal relationship between maternal employment and under-five children malnutrition in Bangladesh by using the instrumental variable approach utilizing the augmented cross-sectional samples of 25,667 and 1665 ever-married women at the national level and in metropolitan cities, respectively. This study finds a higher likelihood of stunting children of employed mothers at the national level, at 11.7%. The probabilities of stunting, wasting, and underweight children of employed mothers are also very high in metropolitan cities at 15.8%, 2.9%, and 11.6%, respectively. These impacts on the children of formal-working mothers are comparable to those of both formal and informal-working mothers, almost double at the national level and in metropolitan cities. The likelihood of stunting children of formal-working mothers at the national level is 20.2% and the probabilities of stunting, wasting, and underweight children of formal-working mothers in metropolitan cities are 28.3%, 5.3%, and 20.9%, respectively. This study is a good reference for the policymakers of Bangladesh; with it, they can adopt effective measures to curb early childhood malnutrition.
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Used data of the DHSs are available in the following link: https://dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.cfm.
Notes
Section-45 states that working women will receive a maternity leave of 4 months (8 weeks before and 8 weeks after birth) for their first and second children. Later, this was amended by gazette notification in 2011, for 6-month maternity leave in the public sector (MoF 2011), which is also being implemented in the private sector gradually.
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Acknowledgements
This article is prepared based on my master’s dissertation in 2020 at the University of Birmingham, the UK. The author thanks Dr. Yi Liu, supervisor, for her meticulous comments and suggestions in preparing the dissertation. The author thanks the NIPROT and DHS programs for providing access to the BDHS datasets. The author is also thankful for the constructive feedback from two anonymous reviewers and editors of this journal.
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Hosen, M.Z. Impact of maternal employment on children malnutrition status in Bangladesh: an empirical analysis. J. Soc. Econ. Dev. 25, 500–530 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-023-00232-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-023-00232-5