WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

178
N. ALAM –J. VAN GINNEKEN –A. BOSCH
birth cohorts, but this became less so or ceased completely for children
in the most recent birth cohort (1995-99).
There is a debate on the issue if increases in maternal education
and household economic status are mediating factors that explain the
decreases in the sex differentials in child mortality. Arokiasamy (2004)
reports that women’s education (secondary and above and) and betteroff
households reduce excess female child mortality in India. In contrast,
our results revealed that in Matlab maternal education did not
reduce the sex differential in mortality in either area. This last finding is
consistent with results of earlier studies (Bhuiya and Streatfield, 1991;
Das Gupta, 1987). In addition, household wealth did also not help to
reduce the sex differential in mortality in Matlab.
We found relatively small differences in nutritional status between
boys and girls both in Matlab and in Bangladesh. For example, in a
recent national survey it was found that more girls are undernourished
than boys at ages 24-59 months old, but not at ages 6-23 months. This
finding is consistent with the conclusion of Sommerfelt and Arnold
(1998), who analyzed child nutrition data of 41 surveys from 31 countries
and found relatively small differences between boys and girls in
terms of prevalence of stunting, underweight and wasting. These results
corroborate our finding that the diets of girls and boys differ to
some extent, but not radically.
Although boys and girls are now equally immunized in Bangladesh,
boys may still be favoured to girls with respect to treatment of
major infectious diseases like diarrhoea and ARI–major killer diseases
in the country (BDHS, 2004). The evidence was, however, inconclusive
because results of BDHS 2004 were not consistent with those of
BDHS 1993-94. It is likely, however, that parents may continue to be
somewhat more willing to incur more health costs for sons than for
daughters.
As already said before, a major conclusion we reached is that the
male-to-female ratios in mortality declined over time. This raises the
question whether one can estimate the impact of a decline in
male/female mortality by looking at changes in population sex ratios.
We are of the opinion that this is very difficult to do. Sex ratios in the
population are influenced by a large number of factors relating to
patterns of and changes in fertility, mortality and migration and it is
difficult to separate the effect of decreases in male/female mortality
from all the other factors. It is especially hard to quantify the impact of
changes in migration patterns on the sex ratio. For the same reason we
think that methodologies used to determine trends in missing women