Exploring Access to Maternal Health Services and Infant Mortality Regional Differentials Peru 2000

Lissette Aliaga Linares, University of Texas at Austin
Thomas W. Pullum, University of Texas at Austin

This paper explores a new methodology to calculate regional estimates of the relationship between access to maternal health services, mainly the use of prenatal care, and infant mortality rates. Using geographic weighted regression and point-spatial autocorrelation techniques on DHS geo-referenced cluster data for Peru 2000, the strength of this relationship is tested when controlling for social factors such as the proportion of rural, indigenous and low-education women. The results show significant regional variations of the impact of public health policy even within regions inside the South Andean, Coast and Jungle parts of Peru that are not captured when using non-spatial statistical modeling methods based on survey data. An argument is made for the contribution of spatial techniques to analyze inter- and intra-regional variations.