Justifying the Impact of Economic Deprivation, Maternal Status and Health infrastructure on Under-Five Child Mortality in Pakistan: An Empirical Analysis

During the 1980’s child survival first time attached with biological and social factors for its determination (Mosley and Chen, 1984). Socioeconomic factors need some proximate factor to impact child survival, at that time, policymakers believe that socioeconomic factors indirect impact on child survival. But maternal factors, environmental contamination, nutrient deficiency and injury have direct impact on child survival. This study has tried to justify the fact that economic deprivation, health, infrastructure and maternal status impact under-five child mortality in Pakistan over the period of 1980 to 2017. For checking the stationarity of the data, Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test is applied. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model has been used for examining the co-integration among the variables of the model. Granger causality test has been applied to explore the causal relationship among the variables. The estimated results show that there is a long run relationship among the variables of the model. The results of Granger causality test highlight that there is unidirectional causality is running from independent variables to the dependent variable. The findings suggest that for reducing under-five child mortality, the government of Pakistan should improve the maternal status and health infrastructure whereas economic deprivation should be minimized.