Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940

Children’s Growth and Poverty in Rural Guatemala

Choices about treatment for ARI and diarrhea in rural Guatemala.

This paper uses the 1995 Guatemalan Survey of Family Health (EGSF) to analyze the relationship between child illness and health seeking behavior. The EGSF contains detailed calendar data on the nature and timing of illness and treatment behavior for children age five and below; extensive information about the characteristics of mothers, families and communities; and data on the accessibility of...

Ethnicity, Language, and Economic Well-Being in Rural Guatemala

We examine ethnic differences in objective and perceived economic well-being in rural Guatemala. The evidence shows that long-standing ethnic differentials in objective indicators of household economic well-being actually widened between 1988 and 1995, a period characterized by rapid economic growth rates. We examine the effects of a major determinant of household economic well-being in rural G...

Microbiological effectiveness of disinfecting water by boiling in rural Guatemala.

Boiling is the most common means of treating water in the home and the benchmark against which alternative point-of-use water treatment options must be compared. In a 5-week study in rural Guatemala among 45 households who claimed they always or almost always boiled their drinking water, boiling was associated with a 86.2% reduction in geometric mean thermotolerant coliforms (TTC) (N = 206, P <...

Migration, the financial crisis, and child growth in rural Guatemala

Migration has been demonstrated by various studies to be closely linked to improvements in individualand household-level outcomes. It is difficult to identify with confidence the causal effects of migration, however, and likely that some of the observed differences are related to selection. In this paper, rather than examining the “positive” effects of migration, we put the spotlight on how the...