Browsing by Author "Hossain, Md. Shahadath"

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How health shocks and its relationship to repayments of loans from microfinance institutions can affect migrant households in Bangladesh
(Taylor & Francis Online, 2/8/2019) Hossain, Md. Shahadath; Sarker, Malabika; Nazneen, Shaila; Basu, Bharati; Rasul, Fatema Binte; Adib, Hossain I.
Increasing the feasibility of easy loan repayment is one of the objectives of providing microcredits for income generating activities requiring relatively small loans in the developing countries. However, evidence in the developing countries suggests that microcredits are often used by households for non-income generating expenditures needed to deal with shocks such as health shocks. Health shocks in particular have severe financial implications due to the absence of health insurance programs in the developing countries and also because they reduce income generating capabilities. The objective of this paper is to examine, using a survey data from Bangladesh, whether there is an association between the health shocks and the loan repayments performance of the borrowers of microfinance institutions. When issues involving mixed distribution of the outcome variable and endogeneity of health shocks are taken care of with IV Tobit and Two-part models, the results show that the health shocks lower both the probability and the amount of repayments. In addition, since a significant portion of the households in Bangladesh represents migrant households, this hints at important policy implications.
Medical expenditure and household welfare in Bangladesh
(BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, 2016-10) Zaman, Nabila; Hossain, Md. Shahadath
The reliance on heavy out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure for medical care leads to households getting trapped into a vicious cycle of poverty. In Bangladesh, private health care expenditure accounts for almost 64% of total health expenditure being ﬁnanced from out-of-pocket (OOP). These escalating medical costs cause ﬁnancial hardship for a majority of households and may even lead to a welfare loss. Using household-level data from Household Income and Expenditure Survey-2010 and applying a log-linear regression estimation procedure, the study estimates the catastrophic impact of health expenditure on household welfare. Welfare loss is associated with a reduction of ‘food expenditure’ and ‘non-food expenditure’. The study ﬁnds that compared to households with no healthcare expenditure, households with non-catastrophic healthcare expenditure reduced food expenditure by 3.1% and households with catastrophic healthcare expenditure reduced food expenditure by 15.2%. Compared to households ﬁnancing healthcare from internal sources, households with external ﬁnancing reduced food and non-food expenditures by 5.57% and 1% respectively and households that ﬁnance healthcare from both internal and external sources reduced food and non-expenditures by 11.4% and 16% respectively. Our ﬁndings indicate that a catastrophic health event diverts household income to health care by a large amount (28.1%) which causes signiﬁcant reduction in non-food expenditure. eventually causing a substantial loss in household welfare. Catastrophic health events did not reduce food consumption signiﬁcantly but it has a signiﬁcant impact on non-food expenditure. Non-hospital medical expenses such as the cost of medicine was the primary cause of facing catastrophic health event.