An Impact Evaluation of Safe Motherhood Hospital Program

The Safe Motherhood Hospital program aims to improve maternal and child health and reduce mortality among mother and child. The program has been in place for 10 years, but there has been no impact evaluation of the program. In this research, we evaluate whether the program has an impact on maternal mortality and the cost of child delivery. The research uses Propensity Score Matching (PSM) technique that widely used for non-experimental studies. PSM has been a popular approach to estimate causal treatment effects, particularly when evaluating labor market policies and social programs The technique is considered inexpensive and very useful for evaluating public projects in Thailand where projects have been implemented without a prior design for impact evaluation. From out analysis, we find that number of changes of director of the hospital, geographic factors, size of catchment area, socio-demographic structure.