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Health, Nutrition and Economic Development
Abstract
This paper analyses, in a simple two-region model, the undertaking of noxious facilities when the central government has limited prerogatives. The central government decides whether to construct a noxious facility in one of the regions, and how to …nance it. We study this problem under both full and asymmetric information on the damage caused by the noxious facility in the host region. We particularly emphasize the role of the central government prerogatives on the optimal allocations. We …nally discuss our results with respect to the previous literature on NIMBY and argue that taking into account these limited prerogatives is indeed important.
... In this case, future output level can be increased with the developments in health issues as well. Strauss and Thomas (1998) research indicates that some evidence that is related to productivity and health because according to Strauss and Thomas (1998), there is a strong relationship between health and economic development. In this research, it is stated that there is a strong relationship between labor market and health issues. ...
... In this case, future output level can be increased with the developments in health issues as well. Strauss and Thomas (1998) research indicates that some evidence that is related to productivity and health because according to Strauss and Thomas (1998), there is a strong relationship between health and economic development. In this research, it is stated that there is a strong relationship between labor market and health issues. ...
... They also found a strong effect of health in explaining income per capita differences. Other studies such as Greiner (2005), Agenor (2007), Strauss andThomas (1998) andMartins (2005) conducted for other countries all emphasized that health expenditure is positively related to economic growth. What differ from one country to another is the extent and magnitude of its contributions. ...
A nation with healthy population is considered a healthy nation, hence no amount of resources spent on the health sector is considered too much. This research seeks to evaluate the impact of health expenditure on economic growth in Cross River and Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria. Four objectives were formulated to guide and direct the study. The objectives were to investigate the relationship between gross fix capital formation, total health expenditure, government health expenditure, health output funding and Gross Domestic Product growth in Cross River and Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria from 1980-2019. The ordinary least square regression analysis was employed as the estimating technique to test the impact of health funding on economic growth of Cross River and Akwa Ibom States respectively. The findings showed that there exist a significant relationship between gross fix capital formation, and gross domestic product growth, there exist a significant relationship be total health expenditure and gross domestics product growth in Cross River and Akwa Ibom State. Also government health expenditure and health output funding exert a significant impact on Gross Domestic Product growth(GDPGR) in Cross River and Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria. The study recommended that increase in health expenditure provision be expanded in order to increase productivity in both States.
... In the analytic models, the increase in animal protein consumption associated with improved incomes is emphasized because of its impacts on climate change. Still, any simple metric of national diets obscures a complex set of relationships among rising incomes, diverse diets, and health outcomes, which have their own impacts on productivity and income (Strauss and Thomas 1998;Deaton 2003;Fogel 2004;Siddiqui et al. 2020). ...
... As a consequence, the prevalence of adverse diet-linked outcomes falls. This is especially important for children, since relatively brief periods of maternal and child malnutrition can lead to a lifelong diminishment of physical and mental capacities, which, in turn, limits educational attainment and the accumulation of other forms of human capital (Perisse, Sizaret, and Francois 1969;Victora et al. 2008;Strauss and Thomas 1998;Siddiqui et al. 2020). Conversely, reductions in the prevalence of undernourishment boost the welfare and productivity of individuals and, in the aggregate, lead to economy-wide gains, especially when driven by improved agricultural incomes (Asenso-Okyere et al. 2011;Webb and Block 2012). ...
This chapter summarizes the key points of Pritchett’s analysis, employing a mixed-methods approach, incorporating a literature review and comparative case studies. The chapter provides a detailed examination of the transition from the MDGs to the SDGs, and encapsulating their respective impacts and the broader implications for
global development strategies.
... A healthy person contributes to human capital positively and thus more human capital gives rise to higher economic growth. Thus labor quality in the form of human capital, clearly contributes significantly to economic growth (Strauss and Thomas, 1998;Bloom et al., 2004). ...
... A healthy person contributes to human capital positively and thus more human capital gives rise to higher economic growth. Labor quality in the form of human capital, clearly contributes significantly to economic growth (Strauss and Thomas, 1998;Bloom et al., 2004). Well (2007) indicated both direct and indirect channel through which health increases the economic growth in country. ...
Recent conceptual frameworks for the determinants of health status in populations emphasize the potential importance of context for relationships between various factors and individual health. These factors as determinants of health can be divided further into three categories i.e. social determinants, economic determinants, and medical facility determinants (Grossman, 1972). This study aims to analyze the gender as social determinant and asset deprivation as economic determinant of individual health status in Pakistan by using data of Pakistan Social and Living Standard Measurement survey (2014-15). The dependent variable is health status of individual and the independent focused variables are gender and asset deprivation. Asset deprivation index is constructed from six questions about individuals‘ access to assets in household. The logistic regression results show that gender and asset deprivation are significant determinants of health status. If individual is male then odds of good health status increases while the odds of good health status decreases with increase in asset deprivation. Marginal effects at means show that; the predicted probability of good health status increases by 1.13 percentage points as gender variable value changes from 0 to 1 i.e. female to male, while predicted probability of good health status decreases by 0.12 percentage points as asset deprivation index increases by one unit. The results are consistent after region and province wise robustness, and the sensitivity analysis by including more variables. The asset deprivation index is also robust to the different construction methods; the result with asset deprivation index constructed by Principal Component Analysis is similar. The results of predicted probabilities for combination of gender and asset deprivation index shows that the chance of good health status decreases for both genders as the asset deprivation increases, but asset deprived female are more vulnerable to bad health status than asset deprived male. The instrumental variable results show that after removing endogeneity from the model the effect of asset deprivation increases very highly, the marginal effect of asset deprivation is decreasing the probability of good health status by 1.1 percent. The findings of this study imply that in case of Pakistan there exist gender differences in health status as females have disadvantage in health. Government should initiate those health policies which decrease gender stereotyping in health. In case of asset deprivation, Government should take steps in providing health care to asset deprived citizens. The female asset deprived should be provided more healthcare benefits due to their higher vulnerability to bad health status.
... is emphasized, in turn, because of its impacts on climate change. Still, any simple metric of national diets obscures a complex set of relationships among rising incomes, diversified diets, and health outcomes, which have their own impacts on productivity and income (Strauss and Thomas 1998;Deaton 2003;Fogel 2004;Siddiqui et al. 2020). ...
... As a consequence, the prevalence of adverse diet-linked outcomes falls. This is especially important for children, since relatively brief periods of maternal and child malnutrition can lead to a lifelong diminishment of physical and mental capacities, which, in turn, limits educational obtainment and the accumulation of other forms of human capital (Perisse, Sizaret, and Francois 1969;Strauss and Thomas 1998;Victora et al. 2008;Siddiqui et al. 2020). Conversely, reductions in the prevalence of undernourishment boost the welfare and productivity of individuals and, in the aggregate, lead to economy-wide gains, especially when driven by improved agricultural incomes (Asenso-Okyere et al. 2011; Webb and Block 2012). ...
Established by the United Nations in 2015 with a target date of 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework with specific objectives to guide global development policy. The SDGs extend and modify an earlier framework, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established in 2000 with a target date of 2015. Goal 1 of the MDGs was to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, with the specific goals of halving the proportions of both undernourished and malnourished people between 1990 and 2015. The poverty goal was met fully, ahead of schedule, and substantive progress was made toward the hunger goal due, in large part, to gains in agricultural production and productivity. Building on this progress, SDG 2 aims to "end hunger" and "achieve food security and improved nutrition," while promoting "sustainable agriculture." Lifting millions of families from the desperate cycle of hunger and poverty also had consequences for the environment. Roughly 72% of the world's freshwater supplies go to agriculture; in South Asia, agriculture uses over 90%. On-farm greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are growing too. Global on-farm GHG emissions grew by about 10% between 1990 and 2020, from 6.7 to 7.4 GtCO2e; in Asia, during the same period, on-farm GHG emissions grew by 27%, from 2.5 to 3.2 GtCO2e. All of this puts agriculture and food systems at odds with other SDG goals, particularly Goal 6, which calls for efforts to better manage water supplies; Goal 12, which aims to reduce agriculture's environmental footprint; and Goal 13, which calls for urgent action to combat climate change. This paper looks at how past technology choices opened a pathway to prosperity in Asia that now threatens the region's natural resources and the stability of the planet's climate. Specifically, the paper focuses on the greenhouse gas emissions from two practices, the cultivation of paddy rice and the growth in livestock production, in 15 countries in South and Southeast Asia, which collectively account for more than 80% of the global emissions from each practice. Based on country-specific habit-formation models of dietary choice estimated from a 15-country panel of annual data from 1970 to 2020, out-of-sample projections show that business-as-usual emissions from rice production and animal waste will increase by 57% and 204%, respectively, over the next three decades. The projections are robust to alternative assumptions about income growth. This illustrates how the past success of the intensive agricultural technologies, and the income gains they helped spur, has led to still-ongoing dietary transitions that will complicate and hinder future efforts to reduce on-farm emissions, as researchers and policymakers strive to foster greener technologies to reduce agriculture's environmental footprint-technologies that must also sustain continued productivity gains if all SDGs are to be met.
... In high-income settings, a contribution to this association has been hypothesized to be due to status, prestige and self-and social-esteem which may be associated with taller stature 4 . Further in some settings, this connection has been hypothesized also to be due to physical strength and more robust health accompanying taller stature, which is favorable for manual and agrarian labor 5 . Adult height is also the culmination of nutritional exposures and growth from conception through adulthood 1,6 . ...
... However, in this review HP estimates differ greatly among studies. Further, there are methodological difficulties in accurately quantifying the relationship between height and wages, including ascertaining whether the relationship is associative or causal, and estimating the contribution of height to wages independent of its many covariates 5,11 . Different statistical methods commonly are used to examine the relationship between height and wages. ...
The association between adult height and labor-market wages, or the “height premium” (HP), is an important input for quantifying potential economic benefits of nutritional interventions promoting growth. A large economics literature has evaluated this association; however, HP estimates differ greatly depending on the study populations and statistical methodologies used. We conducted a meta-analysis of HP estimates to describe the differences in estimates with different statistical methodologies and to examine potential effect modification of the HP by sex and country income category. We performed meta-analyses for studies using instrumental variables (IV) and ordinary least squares (OLS) methods, separately. OLS estimates were separated into those that were “low-adjusted” for confounding variables and “high-adjusted” for at least one common mediator variable, specifically cognition or schooling. Overall, in a total of 12 studies, the pooled estimates for IV studies indicated that each centimeter increase in height was associated with 3.58% greater wages (95% CI: 1.62-5.54%; I ² =97.5%, p<0.001)). In the 24 total OLS studies, low-adjusted estimates indicated an HP of 1.06% (95% CI: 0.85-1.28%, I ² =95.5%, p<0.001), while for high-adjusted estimates the HP was only 0.57% (95% CI: 0.41-0.73%, I ² =95.8%, p<0.001). Further, the meta-analysis found evidence of effect modification by sex in OLS estimates but not IV, and for both IV and OLS for country income category. Overall, the literature suggests a robust association between adult height and wages; however, the magnitude of the estimate appears to be dependent on statistical methods and covariates selected for multivariable models. Our findings also suggest there may be differences by sex and country income category. Additional analyses are needed taking into account a causal inference framework and, if adult height is being used to capture the cumulative effect on wages of nutritional exposures from conception through adulthood, studies should not adjust for potential mediators including cognition and schooling.
... (Castells-Quintana, David , 2011) considered that the consequence of the link between this variables is a complex phenomenon and depends on several factors such as level of development, stage of urbanization, and nature of main economic activities. Many studies showed that health has a positive impact on the economic growth through the increase in worker productivity (Schultz, P.T. and Tansel, 1992), (Strauss, J. and D. Thomas , 1998), (Schultz, P.T., 1999a), (Schultz, P.T. , 1999b), (Savedoff, W.D. and P.T. Schultz , 2000)and (Schultz, P.T., 2002).Similarly, (Bloom, D. and J.D. Sachs, , 1998) , 2019) concluded that human capital has a positive relationship with economic growth in Nigeria and found bidirectional causality between these variables using income measurement approach. Hence, the third hypothesis is as follows: H3.Demographic factors have a positive impact on economic growth. ...
Purpose-This study investigates the short-and long-run causality linkages between the socioeconomic development measured by the GNI per capita PPP (purchasing power parity) and 4 groups of selected factors including information and communications technology (ICT), political, demographic, and macroeconomic indicators in a panel of 19 countries classified as High Income (HI) or Upper-Middle-Income (UMI) countries from MENA zone between 2008-2021. Design/methodology/approach-For comparison analysis between groups, the research design is based on four different Granger non causality tests. The first is the pairwise (Granger, 1969) non causality test, the second is the (Dumitrescu and Hurlin, 2012) panel non-causality test, the third is the panel VAR Block Exogeneity Wald Tests, and the latest is the panel ARDL ECM-based Granger non causality tests.
Findings-The results suggest that each group of the considered factors is a predictor with effects differ depending on the type of factors or the income level of the country. Based on the descriptive analysis and more sophisticated econometric techniques, the difference is obvious between the 2 groups of countries in the short-and long-term. Indeed, in the short term, besides agriculture indicator, the GNI for each group is affected by at least one of the ICT indicators in addition to tourism for the first group and demographic and political factors for the second group. In the long-run, GNI is caused by demographic factors for HI countries (except for Kuwait and Libya) and economic factor (except for Oman), ICT factors for Iran, Kuwait, Oman, and Lebanon and all UMI countries except Jordan. In addition, the political (demographic) factors for Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey (for all UMI countries except Syria), and the economic (political) factors for Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia (Algeria and Morocco) contribute to the GNI prediction in the long-run.
Originality/value-. In light of the MENA socioeconomic development aspirations to achieve convergence on key factor targets, including ICT, political, demographic, and macroeconomic indicators, this research provides novel insights on socioeconomic development predictors and causality linkages.
Practical implications-. According to the empirical findings, this paper identifies the factors that impact the socioeconomic development around the MENA zone. The findings come in help for Governments and policymakers to adjust their policies and to design the most adequate policy according to the causality linkages between GNI and the selected factors.
... Undernutrition is linked with an increased risk of infectious diseases (Walson & Berkley, 2018), while overweight and obesity are risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and other chronic diseases (Kearns et al., 2014). The adverse effects of ill health on wages and productivity in low-income contexts is well described in the literature (Strauss & Thomas, 1998). Moreover, undernutrition in early childhood significantly affects neurocognitive development (Kar et al., 2008), with long-term consequences for learning abilities (Case & Paxson, 2008) and years of schooling (Victora et al., 2008). ...
Malnutrition, in all its forms, poses a significant threat to human development and economic growth. Consequently, enhancing food security and consumption is a moral and social imperative for fostering development. Despite the substantial evidence on the relationship between caloric intake and labour productivity, research on the connection between labour productivity and diet quality, measured by micronutrient intake, is scarce. This paper, focusing on Kenya, estimates the linkages between micronutrient intake and labour productivity, measured by household labour income. The daily intakes of energy and micro-nutrients per adult male equivalent at the household level is computed employing food consumption data collected in the 2015-2016 Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey. Econometric results show that daily micronutrient (haem iron, zinc, folate, calcium, vitamins B2 and A) intakes are significantly and positively correlated with labour productivity. The quality of diets, reflected by micronutrient intakes, has a bigger impact on labour productivity than the daily energy consumed, measured by caloric intake. This paper contributes to the nutrition-productivity literature and provides a basis for designing policies to improve the nutritional quality of diets.
... Many studies have shown that children with poor health and nutrition during early years grow up to be shorter 6,43 and more vulnerable to chronic health diseases. [44][45][46][47] The second mechanism is predicted to work through schooling and learning; nutritional deficits (e.g., protein deficits) during early life have been associated with impaired growth of the brain, affecting cognition, and learning. [48][49][50][51] Adverse nutritional conditions during gestation and early life may also delay entry into school, increase the probability of dropping out of school, and reduce years of schooling. ...
In utero exposure to income shocks has a lasting effect on child well-being. In an agricultural economy, fluctuations in rainfall directly affect household income. In this paper, we investigate the short- and long-run impact of pre-pregnancy, prenatal, and early-life exposure to fluctuations in rainfall on height for a sample of 2290 children in rural Pakistan. Given the widespread canal irrigation system prevalent in the country, we also investigate how fluctuations in river water flows affect child health. We find that fluctuations in rainfall during the pre-pregnancy period have the most lasting effects on the stature of children in the short and long run. Exposure of a mother to a 1 standard deviation reduction in rainfall during the pre-pregnancy period led her child to be 0.17 standard deviations (0.53 cm) shorter by age four. This negative impact of a pre-pregnancy rainfall shock on height persisted over time; the child continued to be 0.12 standard deviations (0.83 cm) shorter, on average, by 13 years of age. However, we find that the effect of pre-pregnancy rainfall fluctuations on children’s height is smaller in districts that have access to irrigation facilities.
... A consistent increase in meal participation rates was evident following the implementation of UFSM programs. This uptick suggests that removing financial barriers encourages more students to partake in school meals, thereby ensuring consistent access to nutrition during critical developmental periods (Beuchelt & Badstue, 2013;Ruel & Alderman, 2013;Strauss & Thomas, 1998). The elevated participation rates are particularly significant among students from low-income households, for whom school meals may represent a substantial portion of daily nutritional intake. ...
Food security is a persistent global challenge, particularly in low-income communities where access to nutritious food is limited. Free nutritious meal programs have been introduced to enhance food access and improve nutritional intake, especially for vulnerable populations such as children and low-income families. Despite their implementation, their overall impact on food security at the household and community levels remains underexplored. This systematic review examines the role of free nutritious meal programs in improving food security by evaluating their effects on food availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability. The study also highlights economic, social, and policy-related challenges affecting program sustainability. A systematic literature review was conducted following PRISMA guidelines. Data were sourced from academic databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed, focusing on studies published in the last decade. Thematic analysis was employed to identify trends related to program effectiveness, policy integration, and long-term sustainability. Findings indicate that free meal programs enhance food security by increasing access to nutritious food, reducing malnutrition, and improving educational and economic outcomes. However, challenges such as financial constraints, logistical barriers, and policy fragmentation limit long-term success. While free nutritious meal programs offer short-term relief for food insecurity, their sustainability depends on strong policy support, financial investment, and integration with local food systems. Further research should explore scalable models to ensure their long-term effectiveness in diverse socio-economic settings.
... With different approaches, they sought to explain the network of factors that interact to shape the outcome of children nutritional status and health. The microeconomic model developed by Becker (Becker 1965) cited in (Strauss & Thomas, 1998) often known as Becker's microeconomic model of household production is one of such models which provides a useful understanding of the concept of child nutrition status which expressed the determinants of nutrition in a household micro function termed "nutrition function" (Chandran, 2009). ...
Food insecurity and malnutrition remain global food and health challenge. This is likely to be severe in developing countries where statistics on food insecurity and malnutrition are high. This study examined the association between dietary pattern and child nutritional status using the weight-for-age as indicator.
A child was defined as having poor nutritional status (underweight) if his or her weight-for-age index was less than minus two standard deviations below the WHO reference median. Guided by previous studies, dietary diversity was measured by a composite index score based on different food components. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to examine the effects of dietary pattern on child nutritional status. The 2014 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey which is the main data source of this study, is based on a nationally representative sample survey of about 12, 831 household interviews conducted in Ghana. This study sampled a total of 1195 children aged 6–23 months in the 2014 GDHS data set children’s file.
About 17% of children under five years in Ghana were found to have poor nutritional status. Child’s age, child birth size and household wealth status were found to be significant predictors of child nutritional status. However, sex of child, region, maternal education, incidence of diarrhea, place of residence and dietary pattern were found to be not significant predictor of child nutritional status.
The study did not establish any relationship between dietary pattern and child nutritional status. The study recommend that more education should be provided to pregnant women by Ghana health service to improve on the child birth size of yet born children which is key to improving the health and nutritional status of children under five years in Ghana.
... Height is not a perfect placebo outcome, as extreme calorie deprivation can reduce heights. However, most hookworm infections were not extreme, and height also reflects in-utero health, early life conditions, and characteristics of parents that may be changing in the background (Beach et al., 2022;Martorell, 1995;Strauss and Thomas, 1998). While point estimates are small and positive, I find no significant effect of exposure to the de-worming campaign and height. ...
Exposure to infectious disease in early life may have long-term ramifications for health and mortality. This study leverages quasi-experimental variation from the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission's de-worming campaign in the early 20th century, combined with pre-campaign hookworm prevalence, to rigorously examine the impacts of childhood hookworm exposure on later-life morbidity and lifespan. Pre-intervention surveys find widespread hookworm exposure among children in the American South, but minimal prevalence among adults. I show exposure to de-worming before age five leads to 2.5 additional months of life in a sample of older-age mortality. Further, decreasing hookworm exposure is related to later-life declines in biomarkers for inflammation and skin-tested allergies, in contrast with the predictions of the ``hygiene hypothesis''. Placebo tests using health outcomes that should not be affected by de-worming do not show similar patterns.
... Food diaries have long been used in the nutritional science literature as the most accurate method for capturing food intake (Wiseman et al., 2005). However, in health and development economics, the most common way to collect food consumption data has for many years been to ask respondents to recall ingredients that went into meals consumed over the last 24 hours (Strauss and Thomas, 1998). While researchers recognize that a single 24-hour recall is likely to yield noisy estimates of average food consumption, since there is substantial variation in day-to-day eating habits, few studies collect multiple recalls over time or implement diaries, given the added costs of data collection (Fiedler et al., 2012). ...
Population pressure is speeding the rate of deforestation in Sub-Saharan Africa, increasing the cost of biomass cooking fuel, which over 80 percent of the population relies upon. Higher energy input costs for meal preparation command a larger portion of household spending which in turn induces families to focus their diet on quick cooking staples. We use a field experiment in Zambia to investigate the impact of solar cook stoves on meal preparation choices and expenditures on biomass fuel. Participants kept a detailed food diary recording every ingredient and fuel source used in preparing every dish at every meal for every day during the six weeks of the experiment. This produces a data set of 93,606 ingredients used in the preparation of 30,314 dishes. While treated households used the solar stoves to prepare around 40 percent of their dishes, the solar stove treatment did not significantly increase measures of nutritional diversity nor did treated households increase the number of dishes per meal or reduce the number of meals they skipped. However, treated households significantly reduced the amount of time and money spent on obtaining fuel for cooking. These results suggest that solar stoves, while not changing a household's dietary composition, does relax cooking fuel constraints, allowing households to prepare more meals by reducing the share of household expenditure that goes to meal preparation.
... A small number instead use direct measures of adult cognitive skills (e.g., Alderman et al., 1996;Mumane, Willet, & Levy, 1995). The many empirical studies of the effects of cognitive and other skills on outcomes such as health, nutrition, and fertility almost all use schooling attainment to represent these skills (see Strauss & Thomas, 1998). ...
... In an influential paper, Strauss and Duncan (1998) connect the dots between health, workers' productivity, growth, and development. They conclude, "Questions of the impact of health dynamics, particularly in response to negative shocks and aging, have been barely touched in lowincome environments." ...
... Our study adds to the literature on economic shocks around birth and their effects on children, with increasing evidence indicating that early-life economic shocks have significant, long-lasting effects on health and human capital formation (Almond & Currie, 2011;Heckman, 2000Heckman, , 2012Currie, 2009Currie, , 2020Strauss & Thomas, 1998). While the existing literature robustly demonstrates the impact of parental exposure to income shocks on children's health and human capital, few studies investigate how income shocks affect parents' nutrition and investments in children (Almond et al., 2018;Currie, 2020;Mokhtari, 2023). ...
This paper examines the effect of cash transfers during the 2010 energy subsidy reforms in Iran, which provided monthly lump-sum payments to Iranian citizens, excluding non-Iranian residents. We show that the reform generates a 17% income gap and a 12% poverty rate gap between cash and non-cash recipients, leading to a nutrition gap and changes in parental behaviors affecting children. Health data reveal a growth gap for children exposed to the reform early in life, especially among low-income groups. Counterfactual analysis shows that without transfers, cash recipients would share similar poverty rates and income distributions with non-cash recipients.
... (i) Factors within the realm of the impoverished themselves include instances where greater support in various dimensions of multidimensional poverty leads to its reduction. This group of factors notably encompasses: access to credit and insurance (Jalan & Ravallion, 1999); effectiveness of education (Dreze & Sen, 1995Rachman & Hendrawan, 2021; and the healthcare system (Strauss & Thomas, 1998;Al Ferdous 2020). ...
Vietnam has seen rapid economic expansion in recent decades, yet income distribution remains uneven, with significant disparities among its populace. While some have experienced considerable income growth, others have not. The wealthiest 10% of earners account for nearly 40% of the nation's total income, while the bottom 40% earn just 15%. This inequality is especially pronounced in urban regions, where living costs are higher and job opportunities are scarcer for those with lower educational attainment. Although the Vietnamese government has implemented policies like increasing the minimum wage to address this issue, more action is necessary to ensure that all citizens benefit from economic progress. This study evaluates the influence of institutions on multidimensional poverty using household and provincial data from Vietnam. Employing the Multilevel Probit Model with data from the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) conducted in 2016, 2018, and 2020, the research indicates the following: (i) The impact of institutions on multidimensional poverty varies across localities; (ii) There is a negative correlation between institutions and multidimensional poverty reduction in urban areas and affluent provinces.
... Our dependent variables, denoted as y ict , include standardized height-for-age Z score, self-reported health, and birthweight for a girl i in village c at year t. We adopt standardized height as a long-term health indicator due to its established association with exposure to infectious diseases (Almond, 2006;Liu & Villa, 2020;Maccini & Yang, 2009;Qin et al., 2016;Song & Burgard, 2008;Strauss & Thomas, 1998). Since children's heights are not directly comparable, we adopt the 2007 World Health Organization growth charts to standardize child heights. ...
This paper identifies the health penalty experienced by girls due to having a brother from endogenous sibling gender composition. We propose a girls‐to‐girls comparison strategy and rule out the confounding effect from the sibship size, birth interval, and birth order. Employing an instrumental variable approach and data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies, we find that girls with a brother are demonstrably shorter and report poorer health. This “brother's penalty” manifests even prenatally. Alternative explanations, such as birth order disadvantages, are carefully addressed and ruled out. The results hold even after excluding gender‐neutral ethnic minorities. This observed penalty is likely attributed to unequal resource allocation within families and potential parental neglect. This penalty is amplified in families with lower income and maternal education, implying resource constraints contribute to gender discrimination. Our findings highlight the importance of addressing intrafamily gender bias for ensuring equal opportunities and health outcomes.
Clinical trial registration: Not applicable.
... Health is an essential component of human capital that supports worker productivity by enhancing physical capacity and mental capabilities. Health improvements influence economic growth through many pathways: better health increases labor market participation and worker productivity (Bloom & Canning, 2000;Schultz, 2002;Strauss & Thomas, 1998); higher life expectancy creates incentives to invest in education, innovation, and physical capital and attracts inflows of foreign direct investment (Alsan et al., 2006;Bloom et al., 2007Bloom et al., , 2003Cervellati & Sunde, 2013;Prettner, 2013); and better health, particularly that of women, reduces fertility and spurs an economic transition from a state of stagnating incomes toward sustained economic growth (Bloom et al., 2020;Cervellati & Sunde, 2005Galor, 2011;Galor & Weil, 2000). In contrast, epidemics and pandemics can take an enormous human toll and impose a massive burden on economies (Bloom et al., 2022). ...
... For example, babies with low birthweight (weighing less than 2500 grams) have a higher one-year mortality risk compared to babies who are heavier at birth (Morris et al. 1998;Almond et al. 2005). Furthermore, the surviving children are more likely to have impaired motor and neurological development and chronic illnesses (Strauss and Duncan 1998;Adair 1989;De et al. 2006). Low birthweight babies are also more likely to have a lower cognitive ability, achieve lower levels of education, and experience poorer outcomes in the labor market compared to babies who are born at a higher weight (Currie and Rosemary 1998;Case et al. 2005;Behrman and Mark 2004;Black et al. 2007), contributing to long-term inequality in socio-economic indicators. ...
This paper uses the severe economic crisis in Turkey in 2008-2009 as a quasi-experiment to evaluate the impact of worsening economic conditions during pregnancy on birthweight. Using birth history data from the 2008 and 2013 waves of the Demographic Health Surveys, we find that the economic crisis resulted in decreased birthweight in Turkey, especially impacting infants born to mothers with lower educational levels. Furthermore, a procyclical relationship exists between provincial income levels and the birthweight of infants born to mothers with lower levels of education. However, this relationship is only statistically significant during the crisis period. These results highlights how economic constraints on mothers with lower socio-economic status during economic crises can negatively affect birth outcomes. Furthermore, we examine shifts in fertility behavior and find a decrease in childbirth rates during the crisis, particularly in economically disadvantaged provinces. In line with this decrease in fertility, we also observe a reduced propensity to seek an abortion during the crisis period. Overall, these findings underscore the importance of understanding how economic crises affect infant health and the need for targeted interventions to support vulnerable populations, as well as addressing underlying socio-economic disparities to mitigate their impact on infant well-being.
... In turn these immediate effects can have medium-to long-term implications on higher productivity thanks to better nutrition (Strauss and Thomas 1998), human capital investment and asset accumulation. It is through these channels that social CTs can achieve immediate and long-term poverty reduction and inequality reduction. ...
... Low income or purchasing power in turn contributes to poor nutrition. Thus, a vicious circle gets formed trapping the poor (Strauss & Thomas, 1998). Studies have found that nutritional deficiencies can also inflict lasting damages on health of people. ...
At the time of its independence, India did not have enough production of food grains to meet its domestic demand and had to depend on imports. The Indian government’s policy response then naturally laid priority on increasing aggregate food production by launching the green revolution in the late 1960s. Once production became adequate, attention of public policy for providing food and nutritional security to the people shifted to several other areas such as household access to adequate food, enhancing purchasing power, composition of food basket, production of protein- and vitamin-intensive food items, clean drinking water, and sanitary conditions. This paper begins with a discussion of the concepts of nutritional adequacy, food security, and poverty. It then documents the evolutionary process in Indian policy response since the 1950s in SDG-2-related areas like hunger, nutrition, and food security. This is followed by an examination of the state of food and nutritional securities using several key indicators. The paper also briefly discusses how lives could be saved using a nationally functioning public distribution system and employment guarantee schemes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper concludes with a discussion of current efficiency and environmental concerns and possible way forward.
This study aims to explore the significant regional disparities in health status across Türkiye, focusing on the relationship between socioeconomic, demographic and infrastructural factors that impact household health condition. Recognizing health as a critical component of regional development, the paper constructs a health index, combining subjective and objective measures, using data from the Income and Living Conditions Survey (ILCS) spanning from 2016 to 2021. The research applies a Generalized Ordered Logit (GOL) model to assess health outcomes in relation to variables such as education, income, employment, age, chronic diseases, and housing conditions. Findings reveal notable differences in health conditions across statistical regions in Türkiye. The Istanbul region, characterized by higher education levels, income and employment rates consistently exhibits better health outcomes. Conversely, South East and Middle& North East regions, marked by lower education, income and employment rates, demonstrate poorer health conditions. The paper underscores the necessity of targeted policy interventions to improve health conditions by addressing regional socioeconomic disparities. It suggests policies that enhance education, income and employment opportunities and infrastructure improvements as pathways to fostering regional development and reducing health inequalities. Ultimately, the study offers valuable insights into how improving socioeconomic factors can elevate public health and contribute to equitable regional growth across Türkiye.
Higher economic growth in the post-liberalization phase since the 1990s was expected to translate into rapid all-around improvements in the well-being of the population. A notable exception, however, is apparent in the form of a persistently high level of child undernutrition in the face of rapid economic growth in India. We examine this discordance using different waves of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data and find that economic growth has a more robust effect on child undernutrition during the period 2005–06 and 2015–16 than compared to earlier periods of 1992–93 and 2005–06. We argue that the quantum of growth is important for the effect to be felt on undernutrition, particularly on child stunting and underweight. We conclude that apart from relying on growth, direct investment in the health and nutrition sector should be an important priority for policymaking.
Sustainability is a concept that refers to the ability to maintain ecological balance over time. It involves meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability is a critical issue in public health policy, as it is closely linked to the health and well-being of individuals, communities, and the planet as a whole. In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the importance of the intersection between public health policy and sustainability. This intersection involves understanding how public health policies can affect sustainability and vice-versa. By promoting sustainable practices, public health policies can contribute to the long-term health and well-being of both individuals and the planet. This chapter aims to explore the intersection between public health policy and sustainability, and how they can be integrated to promote health and well-being while preserving the environment. The chapter begins by defining key terms and concepts related to public health and sustainability, followed by a discussion on the importance of integrating these two fields. It then examines case studies and examples of successful integration of public health policy and sustainable practices in various settings, including urban planning, transportation, food systems, and healthcare. Finally, the chapter concludes with recommendations for future research and policy initiatives to promote sustainable public health. Overall, this chapter highlights the potential for a more holistic and integrated approach to public health policy that takes into account the long-term sustainability of our communities and planet.
Peran gizi yang cukup dalam pembangunan kesehatan dan ekonomi secara umum telah diakui sangat penting dan telah banyak dibahas dalam literatur sebelumnya. Sementara itu, penelitian tentang dampak program Bantuan Langsung Tunai (BLT) di Indonesia juga sudah sering dilakukan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengevaluasi pengaruh status penerimaan program UCT terhadap konsumsi pangan rumah tangga di Indonesia. Data yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini berasal dari Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), yang memungkinkan penelitian ini untuk mengontrol berbagai karakteristik sosial ekonomi rumah tangga yang turut mempengaruhi konsumsi pangan rumah tangga. Konsumsi pangan sendiri diproksikan dengan jumlah beras, ayam, dan daging sapi yang dibeli selama sebulan terakhir. Hasil estimasi menunjukkan bahwa tingkat konsumsi beras berbeda nyata antara rumah tangga penerima dan rumah tangga bukan penerima. Sedangkan untuk konsumsi daging ayam dan sapi tidak terlihat perbedaannya secara statistik. Studi ini kemudian berkontribusi pada literatur yang ada yang menyiratkan bahwa UCT memiliki dampak positif pada kesejahteraan rumah tangga penerima manfaat dalam jangka pendek.
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) (especially cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and mental health disorders) increasingly threaten countries’ health achievements and economic future. WHO estimates that 71 percent of all deaths in 2015 were due to NCDs. Over one billion persons suffer from hypertension, which alone is responsible for over 10 million deaths worldwide each year, more than all infectious diseases combined prior to COVID-19. The burden of NCDs continues to rise disproportionately in low-income countries (WHO 2018). NCDs also contribute to 80 percent of the global burden of disability (IHME 2018). Many non-communicable conditions strike working adults during their most economically fruitful years: cutting short lives and careers, undermining productivity, bankrupting families, diverting public resources from more productive uses to cover treatment costs, and preventing society from recouping its investments in workers’ training and skills. In low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs), NCDs tend to affect people at younger ages, reducing educational attainment and lifetime earnings.
This qualitative research study explored the impact of early marriages on women in Malang Regency and examined strategies for preventing such marriages by empowering women. Utilizing data collected through Focus Group Discussions (FGD), the research investigated the complex web of social, economic, and generational consequences resulting from child marriages in rural areas. The study highlights the significant role played by Women’s Leadership Houses (RKP) in the Singosari and Karangploso regions, where community mobilization is employed to foster gender equality and empower women. RKP’s community engagement approach allows members to dissect the underlying factors driving early marriages and adolescent interactions within their communities. The research uncovered a diverse range of issues associated with early unions, each uniquely shaped by the local environment. RKP’s methodology places a strong emphasis on problem identification and potential recognition, encompassing human and natural resources while challenging prevailing social norms that perpetuate early marriages. In conclusion, this study underscores the importance of empowering women and promoting gender equality as key strategies in preventing early marriages. Through qualitative research methods and community engagement via FGDs, we can aspire to create a future where early marriages become a historical relic and women attain the agency and opportunities they rightfully deserve. Keywords: Early Marriage; Women Empowerment; Community Mobi-lization; Gender Equality
We study the effects of employee health on corporate innovation by exploiting staggered medical cannabis legalisation across states from 1995 to 2020. Medical cannabis legalisation increases medical access, thereby significantly influences employee health. Using a difference‐in‐differences empirical design, we find that firms became more innovative after their states legalised medical cannabis use. In particular, we show that firms produced more patents, generated more patents with significant impacts, and attained higher patent value following the passage of bills to legalise medical cannabis. We identify a possible mechanism through which employee health spurs innovation: lower worker turnover. Lower worker turnover encourages firm‐specific human capital investments and facilitates inter‐generational knowledge transfer. Taken together, our findings support the hypotheses that medical cannabis legalisation improves employee health, overall well‐being and their innovative capacities.
This paper investigates the impact of health investment on household income distribution, drawing from data spanning over 10 years from the China Nutrition and Health Survey. The study aims to contribute to the literature by examining the nuanced pathways through which health investment influences income distribution. Utilizing a rich dataset, rigorous empirical methods including quantile regression and cross-sectional data modeling are employed to explore the relationship between health investment and income distribution. The analysis reveals a robust positive association between health investment and both absolute and relative income levels across various demographic and occupational groups. Additionally, the study elucidates the pathways through which health investment influences income, including its effects on illness duration, employment opportunities, effective working time, and educational attainment. The findings demonstrate the dynamic nature of the relationship, indicating that as income levels rise, the impact of health investment on income becomes more pronounced. Moreover, the analysis highlights the role of health investment in facilitating upward income mobility, particularly for low-income households. Overall, these findings provide valuable insights for policymakers, suggesting that strategic health investment initiatives can contribute to achieving more equitable income distribution.
This paper examines the effect of climate change on cereal yields via malaria prevalence in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. To achieve this objective, this paper uses a model composed of a system of two equations estimated with the 3SLS method, the semi-parametric approach and the two-stage system GMM method. Panel data from 31 SSA countries over the period 2000-2019 are used. Results reveal, on the one hand, that a change in temperature and rainfall leads to a significant increase in malaria prevalence. On the other hand, malaria prevalence reduces cereal yields by 2.6% on average in most SSA countries, via its effects on house-hold's agricultural productivity. To reduce malaria prevalence to increase agricultural yields, policy-makers may need to disseminate malaria-reduction-related practices such as the use of insecticide-treated bed-nets and improving access to malaria treatments in rural dwellings.
By exploiting the development of special economic zones (SEZs) in China as a quasi‐natural experiment, this paper evaluates how such zones affect infant mortality. Difference‐in‐differences analysis reveals that SEZs significantly decrease the local infant mortality rate, and the impact is larger for male infants and infants with less‐educated mothers. Further studies show that the SEZs, which acts as an economic growth shock, improve infant survival by increasing the local income. Furthermore, there is no supportive evidence that the SEZs significantly alter either women's fertility‐associated behaviors or environmental pollution. These results highlight the previously ignored human capital‐related consequences of place‐based policies in China.
Background
Malnutrition among children is a significant public health and development issue, especially in low- and middle-income countries, Malawi inclusive, which contributes to preventable diseases and deaths. Significant socioeconomic disparities persist, which affect access to and equal distribution of basic nutrition. This study analyzed the extent and trends of Inequality of Opportunity (IOP) in the nutritional outcomes of children aged 0–59 months.
Methods
The study used nationally representative data from the 2006, 2013–14, and 2019-20 Malawi Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey. In terms of method, we examined IOP in stunting, wasting, and underweight indicators, using the Human Opportunity Index and the Dissimilarity Index in 55,723 children. The Shapley-value technique decomposed the relative IOP.
Results
We find the largest share of circumstance-driven inequality in stunting (8.96 percent), followed by underweight (1.91 percent), and then wasting (0.90 percent). The Shapley-value decomposition results indicate the child's age (29.15 percent for stunting, 12.42 percent for underweight, and 52.36 percent for wasting) and gender (8.28 percent, 18.36 percent and 8.87 percent), wealth (6.36 percent, 22.87 percent and 8.54 percent), and mother's education (6.28 percent, 11.29 percent and 5.51 percent) as the dominant contributors to IOP for all three nutritional outcome indicators; stunting, underweight and wasting, respectively.
Conclusion
The findings suggest that policies aimed at narrowing the wealth and education inequality gap could help equalize nutrition opportunities for children in Malawi.
Using panel data from Indonesia, this paper analyzes short and long‐term drivers of nutritional conditions among children aged 0–15 years. I estimate a Mundlak model in order to better account for the relatively larger “between” variation that is found in the data, and to control for endogeneity biases that may arise due to the correlation of unobserved heterogeneity and observed explanatory variables. As results suggest, children with older, more experienced mothers, and those breastfed, exhibit improved height outcomes, aligning with existing research on breastfeeding's positive health effects. While prior research emphasized the importance of maternal education, this study reveals that, once accounting for father's education, the long‐term effect of the mother's education loses statistical significance. Finally, the findings of this study suggest that household wealth and access to adequate sanitation facilities strongly affect short ‐and long‐run improvements in children anthropometric outcomes.
In the 1960s, endogenous growth theories revealed that human capital as much effect as physical capital in economic growth. Then, it was focused on how to increase human capital accumulation, and it was determined that first of all, education and then health were two main components. There are a lot of studies in the literature trying to assess the relationship between health expenditures and economic growth. In the studies on the relationship between economic growth and health expenditures, which is the subject of this study, it has been observed that economic growth is increased by health expenditures generally, but there are some studies that show that it does not affect economic growth even decrease. In this study, the relationship between health expenditures and economic growth has been examined for OECD countries, including Turkey, with two different methods: dynamic panel data analysis and non-linear panel data analysis. In these methods, firstly, the relationship between health expenditures and economic growth is examined, then the other components of economic growth that are generally accepted in the literature, such as capital accumulation, total factor productivity and the democracy index, whose effects on economic growth are discussed, are included in the model to determine the effect of health expenditures on economic growth has been studied.
The paper examined the impact of public health expenditure on economic growth in Nigeria between 1980 and 2016. The data were sourced from the publications of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The stationarity of the variables was tested using the traditional Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test. The long run relationship was estimated based on the Johansen Cointegration technique and Granger Causality technique was employed to test the existence of causal relationship among the variables. In the long run, we find that as predicted by the theoretical literature, health expenditure exercised a significant positive impact on economic growth. The Granger causality results indicated a unidirectional causality between economic growth proxied by real GDP and all public health variables, namely Gross capital formation, Total health expenditure and Total education expenditure. The study recommends the need for policy makers to give attention to the health sector through increased budgetary allocation and establishment of a strong public finance institutional system that links specific expenditure and revenue decisions to ensure judicious usage and transparency. There is also the need to make more budgetary allocation to education to improve labour factors contribution to economic growth in the country.
Online healthcare supply chain management (OHCSCM) in rural areas is a matter of concern and is susceptible to policy changes, especially after the alarms raised by the COVID‐19 pandemic. This study aims to develop an approach towards examining the state and building a framework for examining the OHCSCM in rural areas. The study develops a framework by integrating various theories and methodologies like stakeholders' theory, critical success factor (CSF) theory, triple bottom line theory, fuzzy set theory, evidential reasoning approach, and scenario analysis for identifying the dynamism among the CSFs. The developed framework helps prioritize the CSFs based on environmental, economic, and social perspectives. Further, the model helps create scenarios for decision‐makers to improve the understanding of the CSFs influencing OHCSCM and achieve sustainability. The study reveals that infrastructure development, security and privacy of data, and use of predictive tools are the top factors that need immediate attention. By recognizing the interdependencies and interactions between these factors, managers can develop a more comprehensive and integrated approach to OHCSCM in rural areas. This understanding enables them to identify potential bottlenecks, streamline processes, and optimize resource allocation, ultimately saving valuable time and resources for achieving sustainability in the online healthcare supply chain in rural areas.
Economic transformation is inevitable in the long-term economic development of a country. According to international experience, both developed and emerging industrialized countries have achieved sustained and rapid development in the process of economic transformation and upgrading.
This paper develops a general, "collective" model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own (possibly altruistic) preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be Pareto efficient. An alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process: agents first share nonlabor income, according to some given sharing rule; then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption. This setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies. Moreover, the observation of labor-supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule (up to a constant). Copyright 1992 by University of Chicago Press.
In recent years the nutritional adequacy of the slave diet has received increasing attention from historians. Scholars have analyzed a wide array of sources such as the manuscript censuses of agriculture and population, the ex-slave narratives, diaries, plantation account books, and agricultural and medical journals to shed new light on the quantities, varieties, and nutritional content of foods consumed by slaves (Fogel and Engerman, 1974; Owens, 1976; Sutch, 1975; Kiple and Kiple, 1977; Savitt, 1978; Crawford, 1980; Kahn, 1983). While these studies have yielded considerable information on the average quality of the slave diet in the American South or for slaves in particular localities, relatively little systematic evidence has been available to date on how the level of nutrition varied among different groups in the slave population, and over time.
In this paper, household is modeled as a two-member collectivity taking Pareto-efficient decisions. The consequences of this assumption are analyze d in a three-good model, in which only total consumption and each mem ber's labor supply are observable. If the agents are assumed egoistic (i.e., they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumptio n), it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household la bor supplies from both a parametric and a nonparametric viewpoint. If , alternatively, agents are altruistic, restrictions obtain in the no nparametric context; useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private-good econ omy. Copyright 1988 by The Econometric Society.
Retrospective reports of the birth and death dates of 5,562 kin from the 1991 Vietnam Life History Survey (VLHS), a sample survey of 403 households and 921 adults in four areas of Vietnam, provide plausible estimates of adult mortality trends and patterns in that country. The VLHS mortality estimates are consistent with estimates from independent sources for recent periods, and, when war deaths are excluded, are in broad agreement with expected patterns from model life tables. After analyzing the quality of the VLHS mortality data, the authors estimate the costs, in Vietnamese lives, of the "American war," from 1965 to 1975. Death rates of young men, age 15-29, during the peak war years were more than seven times higher than "normal" (nonwar) death rates. Applying the VLHS estimated age-specific death rates for war-related deaths to population estimates for the period, the authors estimate that approximately one million (plus or minus 175,000) Vietnamese died either as military or civilian casualties, on both sides, from 1965 to 1975.
Labor being by far the most abundant resource in low-income countries, the determination of the returns to labor plays a central role in models of development. The chapter discusses the operation of low-income labor markets with reference to the models that have been and continue to be influential in shaping the study of such markets. These models are evaluated in terms of their ability to shed light on the realities of the allocation, pricing, and employment of labor in low-income countries. The chapter discusses models directly concerned with and evidence on the employment and pricing of labor in the rural (agricultural) sector. The chapter also discusses the process of determining rural wages are and their rigidity, the social and private costs of reallocating labor from agriculture to other activities, labor supply behavior, labor market dualism, and unemployment determination. The chapter describes risk-mitigating and effort-eliciting contractual arrangements involving rural labor and the organization of the agricultural enterprise in an environment characterized by incomplete markets. The chapter discusses the issue of whether labor is efficiently allocated across sectors and across geographical areas and problems of barriers to mobility. Models of migration incorporating human capital investments, information and capital constraints, uncertainty with respect to employment, riskiness in annual incomes, temporary migration, remittances, and heterogeneity in preferences and abilities among workers are discussed. The chapter also discusses urban labor markets, and addresses issues concerning the duality of urban labor markets and unemployment determination. The chapter highlights issues of importance to the study of developing economies—in particular, life cycle and intergenerational labor market mobility.
Health and nutrition are important as ends in themselves and often are emphasized as critical components of basic needs in developing countries. Cross-country comparisons of standard data suggest that on the average health and nutrition in the developing world falls considerably short of that in the developed world. The chapter presents a review on a number of issues regarding health and nutrition in developing countries and available studies on the determinants of health and nutrition and on their impact on productivity in developing countries. First, the chapter presents a theoretical framework and some issues pertaining to the empirical representation of health and nutrition. The chapter then presents a survey on existing studies of both health and nutrition determinants and on their productivity influence and conclude with some discussion of policy issues and directions for future research. A theoretical framework for the determinants of health and nutrition and their possible productivity impacts is essential to analyze these variables in an organized manner and to be able to interpret empirical studies. The chapter discusses micro production function and demand considerations. The chapter then discusses in brief the supply side and macro relations. Finally, several major econometric problems are reviewed, stating that they are ubiquitous in empirical studies attempting to relate health, nutrition, and socioeconomic variables. Two broad categories of studies of health determinants are of particular interest: those attempting to estimate the reduced-form demand for health outcomes and health-care goods, and those attempting to estimate the underlying health production function.
Studies of experimental and socioeconomic survey data on the direct productivity effects of nutrition indicate growing, though qualified, evidence of positive direct effects of nutrition on labor productivity of poorer individuals in developing countries — greater productivity effects for nutrition than for formal schooling. Studies on the indirect productivity effects of nutrition through cognitive achievement, schooling, and preschool ability also indicate positive productivity effects through these channels. Therefore, for productivity reasons alone, policies that favor better nutrition among the poorer members of society merit serious consideration. That productivity and equity concerns are in harmony is an important plus.
This study represents an empirical test of the productivity consumption relation of the efficiency wage hypothesis, which is briefly discussed here. The research setting and design of the study are described. An energy supplementation program was generally effective in raising the daily energy intake and energy expenditure levels of Guatemalan sugarcane workers who were moderately energy deficient. Increased energy availability did not result in increased energy expenditure at work, or in an increased supply of work units. The results do not provide evidence of a strong productive-energy intake relationship among these workers.
The Heckman procedure is used to correct for sample selection bias in estimating wage offer and net labor market supply equations. The findings show that wages are affected by education and experience. In addition, the wage offer is influenced by other genetic and environmental influences captured in the wage of one's father. Calories, as predicted by exogenous instruments, are also shown to influence the wage offer, suggesting that better nutrition increases labor productivity. The probability of market labor participation as well as the amount of net market labor supply declined with the size of paddy landholding, in addition to the net market supply elasticity increasing with the amount of land owned, and being lower for urban than rural workers.
This paper studies consumption and saving decisions over time in a life cycle model in which survival from one period to the next is endogenous. Survival probabilities depend on health, which is a capital stock subject to depreciation and which can be augmented by consumption (nutrition). Borrowing is ruled out in our model and we investigate optimal consumption decisions when income fluctuates at seasonal frequencies and when income follows a stochastic process. Among other results, we show that understanding the pattern of income is necessary for understanding consumption decisions when survival is probabilistic and endogenous.
This paper examines additional evidence of an empirical test of the productivity-consumption relation of the efficiency wage hypothesis. A cross-sectional analysis showed sharply diminishing productivity returns to higher levels of daily energy intake of Guatemalan sugarcane cutters. No positive and consistent energy supplementation effect on the daily supply of work units could be demonstrated in a time-series analysis. Energy supplementation did not have a delayed impact on worker productivity. It is concluded that increased energy availability may not necessarily result in increased productivity of rural workers who are moderately energy deficient.
This paper evaluates evidence relating to the belief, long held by tropical health workers, that schistosomiasis control would contribute significantly to economic development. The many attempts to estimate the macro benefits of control in terms of the ‘economic loss’ due to the disease are criticized for their emphasis on aggregate output benefits and for the unrealistic assumptions made in estimating the increment in, and marginal product of, efficiency labour units which might result from control. Micro research has so far failed to establish a clear empirical basis for the assumption that schistosomiasis seriously impairs labour productivity — but this may be attributable to sampling bias resulting in the exclusion of workers with severe disease.
The article attempts to develop a general theory of the allocation of time in non-work activities. It sets out a basic theoretical analysis of choice that includes the cost of time on the same footing as the cost of market goods and treats various empirical implications of the theory. These include a new approach to changes in hours of work and leisure, the full integration of so-called productive consumption into economic analysis, a new analysis of the effect of income on the quantity and quality of commodities consumed, some suggestions on the measurement of productivity, an economic analysis of queues and a few others as well. The integration of production and consumption is at odds with the tendency for economists to separate them sharply, production occurring in firms and consumption in households. It should be pointed out, however, that in recent years economists increasingly recognize that a household is truly a small factory. It combines capital goods, raw materials and labor to clean, feed, procreate and otherwise produce useful commodities.
The visual information on a scatterplot can be greatly enhanced, with little additional cost, by computing and plotting smoothed points. Robust locally weighted regression is a method for smoothing a scatterplot, (x i , y i ), i = 1, …, n, in which the fitted value at z k is the value of a polynomial fit to the data using weighted least squares, where the weight for (x i , y i ) is large if x i is close to x k and small if it is not. A robust fitting procedure is used that guards against deviant points distorting the smoothed points. Visual, computational, and statistical issues of robust locally weighted regression are discussed. Several examples, including data on lead intoxication, are used to illustrate the methodology.
If household income is pooled and then allocated to maximize welfare then income under the control of mothers and fathers should have the same impact on demand. With survey data on family health and nutrition in Brazil, the equality of parental income effects is rejected. Unearned income in the hands of a mother has a bigger effect on her family's health than income under the control of a father; for child survival probabilities the effect is almost twenty times bigger. The common preference (or neoclassical) model of the household is rejected. If unearned income is measured with error and income is pooled then the ratio of maternal to paternal income effects should be the same; equality of the ratios cannot be rejected. There is also evidence for gender preference: mothers prefer to devote resources to improving the nutritional status of their daughters, fathers to sons.
In this essay, we present evidence that employers in rural areas of developing countries have imperfect information with regard to the productivity of heterogeneous workers. In addition to obtaining direct measures of the completeness of employer information we consider the implications of information asymmetries for the structure of casual labor markets. We then evaluate the extent to which casual labor markets do, in fact, exhibit these attributes. We find that: (1) there is adverse selection out of the time-rate labor market; (2) employers discriminate statistically: given two workers with different observed characteristics but the same actual productivity, the worker from the group with the higher average productivity will have a higher wage; (3) employers exhibit learning over time: the extent of employer ignorance is negatively related to labor-market exposure on the part of the workers; and (4) calorie consumption affects productivity but is not rewarded in the time-rate labor market. In concluding we argue that an analysis of wage and employment patterns and the implications of these patterns for human capital investment in rural areas of developing countries that ignored the role of information problems could yield misleading conclusions.
Labor supply models are sensitive to the measures of health used. When self-reported measures are used, health seems to play a larger role and economic factors a smaller one than when more objective measures are used. While this may indicate biases inherent in using self-reported measures, there are reasons to be suspicious of more objective measures as well. A statistical model incorporating both self-reported and objective measures of health shows the potential biases involved in using either measure or in using one to instrument the other. The model is initially unidentified, but incorporating outside information on the validity of self-reported measures confirms fears about both the self-reported and objective measures available on such data sets as the Retirement History Survey or the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men.
This study investigates the socioeconomic determinants of adult ill-health in developing countries. We use as measures of health, self-reported general health plus a variety of measures of problems in physical functioning. We begin by comparing measures of adult ill-health in four countries: Bangladesh, Jamaica, Malaysia, and the United States, finding that women report more problems and at earlier ages than do men; this despite the greater longevity of women. We examine the sensitivity of these gender differentials to mortality selection and find that while accounting for this does cut down the differentials, they remain. We discuss potential reasons for these findings and then examine the Jamaican data in more detail. We formulate and estimate a reduced form economic model, focusing on the effects of education. We find strong positive effects of own education on health, mirroring results commonly found in the child health literature. At older ages, however, the education differential disappears. Per capita household expenditure, treated as endogenous, is added to the model to attempt to control for long-run income. It is not found to affect adult female health, but limited evidence is found for an effect on males. Strong residential effects exist, although the factors behind them remain to be investigated. Our most robust finding is that even controlling for socioeconomic covariates, strong life-cycle effects exist and are different for men and women. Controlling for these factors, women still report more health problems at earlier ages than do men.
While many development theorists assume saving propensities vary among different groups, there has been limited theoretical justification for this view. This paper analyzes two complementary theories stressing the effect on saving of physiological consequences of poor nutrition at low incomes. One influence is on the probability of survival; another is on workers' productivity. Either effect means that the average propensity to save can rise with income. Issues considered include annuities, exogenous changes in survival and efficiency, implications for the efficiency wage theory of unemployment, and distinctions between wage and nonwage income. Implications of nutritional effects for econometric specification of saving functions are stressed.
Nonmonetary factors are expected to assume an increasingly important role in determining the demand for medical care as the out-of-pocket money price falls (due to spreading health insurance coverage or the enactment of the federal health insurance legislation). A utility maximization model is used to develop predictions for the demand for "free" and nonfree care. A simultaneous-equation system is estimated on a survey of users of New York City's "free" outpatient departments and municipal hospitals. The empirical results support the major predictions that nonmonetary factors such as travel distance will function as prices in discouraging demand and that earned and nonearned income have different impacts. A number of implications for public policy are suggested, including the possibility of substituting income maintenance for the direct provision or insurance of medical care.
This paper constructs a model of saving for retired single people that includes heterogeneity in medical expenses and life expectancies, and bequest motives. We estimate the model using Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old data and the method of simulated moments. Out-of-pocket medical expenses rise quickly with age and permanent income. The risk of living long and requiring expensive medical care is a key driver of saving for many higher-income elderly. Social insurance programs such as Medicaid rationalize the low asset holdings of the poorest but also benefit the rich by insuring them against high medical expenses at the ends of their lives. (c) 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
This paper introduces the 'separate spheres' bargaining model, a new model of distribution within marriage. It differs from divorce threat bargaining models in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage; this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles. The predictions of the authors' model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models; in the separate spheres model, cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can--but need not--imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages. In the long run, the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium. Copyright 1993 by University of Chicago Press.
Moral hazard plays a central role in many models depicting contractual relationships involving worker effort. The authors show how time-series information on worker health, consumption, and work time can be used to measure the effort effects of payment schemes. Estimates from longitudinal data describing farming rural households indicate that time-wage payment schemes and share-tenancy contracts reduce effort compared to piece-rate payment schemes and on-farm employment. The evidence also indicates, consistent with moral hazard, that the same workers consume more calories under a piece-rate payment scheme or in on-farm employment than when employed for time wages. Copyright 1994 by MIT Press.
Using panel data for rural South India, a fixed-effects individual wage equation and farm production function are estimated that have calorie intake and nutritional status (weight-for-height) of workers as their arguments. Neither market wages, nor farm output, are observed to be responsive to changes in the daily energy intake of workers. However, both are highly elastic with respect to weight-for-height. These results suggest that, while the human body can adapt to inadequate nutrition in the short run, it cannot adapt as readily to chronic malnutrition that eventually results in loss of weight-for-height. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.
Early nineteenth-century Trinidad was one of the most efficient sugar producers in the British West Indies with output per slave three times as high as in Barbados and 70% higher than in Jamaica (Ward, 1978; Ragatz, 1963:332). Slave prices reflected Trinidad’s greater productivity. The Commissioners of Compensation reported in 1837 that between 1822 and 1830 the price of a Trinidad field hand was 64% greater than the price of one in Jamaica (Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, 1837–1838).
Despite Trinidad’s natural advantages as a sugar producer, the island’s first sugar estate was established only in 1787. Spain controlled Trinidad until the British conquest in 1797 and prohibited non-Spanish settlement until 1783. The island’s population in 1783 consisted of only some one thousand Amerindians and an equal number of inhabitants of European or African descent who grew cocoa as well as subsistence crops. Rapid population growth began in 1783 when the Spanish opened the island to settlement by any Roman Catholic. French West Indian slave owners in particular took advantage of this opportunity to settle a nearly unpopulated island and brought the cultivation of sugar cane and coffee to Trinidad. The slave rebellion in Haiti sparked a still larger inflow of French planters and their slaves, and brought the slave population to over 10,000 in 1797 (Fraser, 1891; Carmichael, 1961; Anthony, 1975).
"A model of the spatial distribution of mobile heterogeneous agents is formulated to assess how a price change or program subsidy that is location-specific affects the composition of local residents via selective migration and thus biases evaluations of the effectiveness of the program based on its local consequences. Longitudinal data from Colombia are used to test the implications of migration selectivity. The findings confirm the existence of selective migration, suggesting that local subsidies to human capital attract high-income but, within income groups, low-fertility households and those with low human capital endowments. These migration patterns are shown to be consistent with the dominance of endowment over tastes heterogeneity in the population under plausible behavioral assumptions."
Most estimates of the consequences of public programs rely on the cross-sectional association between region-specific programs and program outcomes. Such estimates assume that the spatial distribution of programs is random. This article reports estimates of the effects of public programs on basic human capital indicators and the biases in conventional cross-sectional estimates of program effects due to non-random program placement. The estimates are obtained from pooled observations on human capital outcomes, socioeconomic variables, and program coverage at the kecamatan (subdistrict) level. The observations are based on successive sets of Indonesian cross-sectional household and administrative data during 1976–86. The determinants of the spatial allocation of programs in Indonesia in 1976–86 are also estimated.
The empirical results indicate that the presence of grade and middle schools in villages has a significant positive effect on the school attendance rates of teenagers. The presence of health clinics in villages also positively affects the schooling of females ages 10–18. However, no evidence is found of any significant effects of the presence of family planning and health programs on either the survival rates of children or on cumulative fertility. The estimates also suggest that the use of cross-sectional data results in substantial biases in the estimates of program effects because of the evident nonrandom spatial allocation of public programs.
There is much public discussion but almost no evidence on the effects of high school curriculum on postsecondary education and on success in the labor market. I use the large variation in curriculum across US high schools to identify the effects on wages and educational attainment of specific courses of study. The main finding is that the return to additional courses in academic subject is small. One cannot account for the value of a year of high school with estimates of the value of the courses taken by the typical student during the year.
In this paper, the authors develop and implement a method for estimating the effects of infant morbidity on the differential allocation of time of family members based on discrete indicators of health and activity participation, commonly available in survey data, and within the context of a household model in which health is determined endogenously. Their estimates that take into account the "simultaneity" of health-activity associations indicate that increased levels of infant morbidity significantly exacerbate existing differentials in the accumulation of human capital across teenage boys and girls in Indonesia. Copyright 1990 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
This paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions, using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation. After assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives, an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition. The model is estimated on a data set from rural Java. The null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected. The results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function. Copyright 1992 by The Econometric Society.
This paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person's "productivity" is an increasing function of intake. In the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small, certain patterns of Lorenz improving asset redistributions (or nutrition transfers) increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment. Copyright 1987 by Royal Economic Society.
This paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person's "productivity" is an increasing function of intake. In the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small, certain patterns of Lorenz improving asset redistributions (or nutrition transfers) increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment. Copyright 1987 by Royal Economic Society.
"The A stochastic frontier production function is used to estimate agricultural efficiency index. Then, controlling for household characteristics and other exogenous variables, the efficiency index is regressed on the probability of being sick. Estimation is performed using the treatment effect model where the probability of being sidelined by sickness is modeled as a probit. This framework allows policy simulations that underscore the impact of farmers' health status on both agricultural efficiency and poverty reduction. Overall, regression results confirm the negative impact of health impediment on farmers' agricultural efficiency. Simulation results show that improving farmers' agricultural efficiency by investing in farmers' health may not necessarily lead to poverty reduction. Additional policy instruments may be needed to achieve simultaneous increase in agricultural productivity and reduction in poverty rate." from authors' abstract
The wide range of calorie-income elasticities in the literature results, in large part, from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation. Elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie-income variable pairs for a sample of Philippine farm households, ranged from 0.03 to 0.59. Estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards, first, because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted (by construction) both to calorie availability and total expenditures, and second, because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income. The calorie intake-total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0.08-0.14 range.
This paper surveys various econometric issues that arise in estimating a relation between the logarithm of earnings, schooling, and other variables and focuses on the problem of "ability" as a left-out variable and the various solutions to it. It points out that in optimizing models the "ability bias" need not be positive and shows, using recent analyses of NLS data, that when schooling is treated symmetrically, allowing it too to be subject to errors of measurement and correlated to the disturbance in the earnings function, the usual conclusion of a significantly positive "ability bias" in the estimated schooling coefficients is not only not supported but possibly even reversed.