  The wealth of nations and the health of populations are intimately strongly
associated, yet the extent to which economic prosperity (GDP per capita) causes
improved health remains disputed. The purpose of this article is to analyze the
impact of sovereign debt crises (SDC) on child mortality, using a sample of 57
low- and middle-income countries surveyed by the Demographic and Health Survey
between the years 1990 and 2015. These surveys supply 229 household data and
containing about 3 million childbirth history records. This focus on SDC
instead of GDP provides a quasi-experimental moment in which the influence of
unobserved confounding is less than a moment analyzing the normal fluctuations
of GDP. This study measures child mortality at six thresholds: neonatal,
under-one (infant), under-two, under-three, under-four, and under-five
mortality. Using a machine-learning (ML) model for causal inference, this study
finds that while an SDC causes an adverse yet statistically insignificant
effect on neonatal mortality, all other child mortality group samples are
adversely affected between a probability of 0.12 to 0.14 (all statistically
significant at the 95-percent threshold). Through this ML, this study also
finds that the most important treatment heterogeneity moderator, in the entire
adjustment set, is whether a child is born in a low-income country.
