The Effects of Mental Health Interventions on Labor Market Outcomes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Crick Lund, Kate Orkin (), Marc J. Witte (), John Walker, Thandi Davies, Johannes Haushofer, Sarah Murray, Judy Bass, Laura Murray, Wietse Tol and Vikram Patel ()
Additional contact information
Crick Lund: King's College London
Kate Orkin: University of Oxford
Marc J. Witte: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
John Walker: University of Oxford
Thandi Davies: University of Cape Town
Johannes Haushofer: Stockholm University
Sarah Murray: John Hopkins University, Baltimore
Judy Bass: Johns Hopkins University
Laura Murray: John Hopkins University, Baltimore
Wietse Tol: University of Copenhagen
Vikram Patel: Harvard University

No 17071, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Mental health conditions are prevalent but rarely treated in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Little is known about how these conditions affect economic participation. This paper shows that treating mental health conditions substantially improves recipients' capacity to work in these contexts. First, we perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomized controlled trials (RCTs) ever conducted that evaluate treatments for mental ill-health and measure economic outcomes in LMICs. On average, treating common mental disorders like depression with psychotherapy improves an aggregate of labor market outcomes made up of employment, time spent working, capacity to work and job search by 0.16 standard deviations. Treating severe mental disorders, like schizophrenia, improves the aggregate by 0.30 standard deviations, but effects are noisily estimated. Second, we build a new dataset, pooling all available microdata from RCTs using the most common trial design: studies of psychotherapy in LMICs that treated depression and measured days participants were unable to work in the past month. We observe comparable treatment effects on mental health and work outcomes in this sub-sample of highly similar studies. We also show evidence consistent with mental health being the mechanism through which psychotherapy improves work outcomes.

Keywords: labor; development; human capital; mental health; psychotherapy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D9 I14 J24 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 90 pages
Date: 2024-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hea and nep-lma
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17071.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17071

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().