Effect of National Immunizations Days on Immunization Coverage, Child Morbidity and Mortality: Evidence from Regression Discontinuity Design

Patrick Asuming, Columbia University
Stephane Helleringer, Columbia University

National Immunization Days (NIDs) campaigns have become an important component of global strategy to eliminate vaccine-preventable diseases. Yet there is a surprising lack of rigorous evaluation of the NIDs due to the difficulty of identifying a suitable comparison group in a counterfactual framework. In this paper we employ a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) approach to provide the first causal estimates of the effect of participation in NIDS on a) routine immunization coverage, b) childhood morbidity and c) mortality using data covering 26 NID campaigns from 20 countries. Our preliminary results shows that participation in NIDs has strong and significant positive effect on routine immunization coverage as measured by receipt of all three doses of DPT vaccine. On-going analysis is looking at the mortality and morbidity effects.