Health capabilities, public policies and the determinants of infant mortality in Brazil

Abstract The infant mortality rate is an indicator of population health and the effectiveness of health systems that is also capable of estimating the extent of social and health inequalities between populations. Over the last 30 years, Brazil has recorded significant reductions in child mortality rates. Between 1990 and 2017, the under-five mortality rate dropped from 53.7 to 15.6 deaths per thousand live births, a 71% reduction over the period. The national reduction average was 6% per year in the 1990s, decreasing to 4.8% in the 2000s and to 3.2% per year between 2011 and 2015, and many factors have been reported as the cause of these improvements.  Even after the implementation of health and social policies that positively affected the health of the populations in Brazil in the last decades, since 2009 the country has experienced a slow decrease in the decline in infant mortality that remained at high levels, registering great regional disparities. After an economic crisis that evolved into a troubled period of political crisis, in 2016 the country recorded increases in under-one-year infant mortality and under-five-year infant mortality rates, that raised from 12.43 deaths to 12.72 deaths per thousand live births and from 14.28 deaths to 14.89 deaths per thousand live births, respectively.  These facts call attention to the possible impact of social determinants of health on infant mortality rates in Brazil after the implementation of these health and social policies. This anomaly in the trend of child mortality, particularly when combined with regional disparities and a slow decrease in the decline in infant mortality rates is of great concern and raise questions about what is the extent of these health and social policies on the country’s ability to maintain a longer-term decline in the infant mortality rate, is it capable of placing this rate at the level of developed countries and what are the determinants of infant mortality in Brazil after the implementation of these public policies.  The overarching goal of this thesis was to identify the determinants of infant mortality in Brazil after the implementation of  the Family Health Strategy and the Bolsa Família programs in order to raise plausible hypotheses for the slowdown, the regional disparities, and the anomaly observed in the trend of declines in the infant mortality rate in Brazil. To attain this objective, we conducted three research papers: 1. a scoping review that aimed at identifying and summarizing the determinants of infant mortality in Brazil under the influence of Family Health Strategy and Bolsa Família programs, with a view of raising hypothesis for the recent changes in the infant mortality rates in Brazil and identifying gaps in terms of research concerning the determinants of infant mortality in the country, 2. a descriptive retrospective analysis according to the perspective of Public Health and health inequalities by adopting the analytical framework proposed by the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, using data from under-one-year old infant mortality rate and from possible determinants of infant mortality in Brazil according to the findings of our scoping review (article 1), and 3. a methodological proposal in order to overcome the challenges to developing a panel data model using aggregated data from the 26 Brazilian states and different subregions according to the Conceptual Model of Health Capability, with a view of inferring possible associations between our independent variables and infant mortality rates in Brazil, aiming at reviewing the hypothesis raised in the scoping review about the recent changes in the country's infant mortality indicators.  The global results of these studies demonstrated that in the light of the Conceptual Model of Health Capability and the social determinants of health, regional disparities related to inequalities in factors such as income, education, employment, fertility rate, access, and quality of health services, account for inequalities in infant mortality rates, especially in the north and Northeast macro-regions of the country, which likely hamper further reductions of infant mortality. Those inequalities would explain both the slowdown in the reduction and the tendency of the infant mortality rate to remain at relatively high levels. Results also demonstrated that variations in those factors for reasons relating to the economic and political crisis, likely have interrupted the secular trend of declining infant mortality rates. In this regard, results suggest that a sharp reduction in employment rate observed between 2014 and 2015, among other factors, may have had a delayed impact on infant mortality rates in 2016. The results also identified an association between employment and different infant mortality indicators, with employment rate possibly impacting child mortality up to three years. Finally, the studies have shown that a household income threshold acts as a protective factor against child mortality, the bigger the proportion of households below this income bracket, the greater the risk of an increase in child mortality.

Keyphrases: Programme Bolsa Familia, Infant mortality, Health capabilities, Capabilities approach, Public policies, Social determinants of health, Conditional cash transfer program, Bolsa Família, Multilevel panel data with fixed effect nested within-cluster, Health Economics, Brazil