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Cereal Prices and Child Undernutrition in Ethiopia
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-07-06) Brenton, Paul
This paper looks at how changing cereal prices affect child undernutrition in Ethiopia. It derives height for age (stunting) and weight for height (wasting) as indicators of child undernutrition from the two most recent years of the Livings Standards Measurement Survey and utilizes market prices for key cereals, teff, wheat, and maize at the enumeration area across all regions of the country. Using a panel data fixed effects model, the analysis finds that, contrary to previous studies, rising cereal prices are positively associated with improved child stunting rates for children between ages 6 months and 5 years. There is no evidence to suggest that cereal prices have a significantly greater impact on height for age for children that come from households who are net sellers of these crops. Cereal prices do not appear to be associated with wasting, which is a shorter-term negative health outcome.
Pathways to Better Nutrition in South Asia: Evidence on the Effects of Food and Agricultural Interventions
(Elsevier, 2021-03) Dizon, Felipe; Josephson, Anna; Raju, Dhushyanth
In South Asia, nearly half a billion people are malnourished. This paper examines the links of food and agriculture with nutrition in South Asia, with the goal of informing policy to reduce hunger and malnutrition in the region. We investigate pathways including public food transfer programs, agricultural diversification, and different methods of food fortification. We find that public food transfer programs, used to make food available and affordable to poor households, are often unable to significantly protect or promote nutrition. But several supply-side food and agricultural interventions show promise in improving nutrition, although their effects have yet to be well identified. These include the cultivation of home gardens, animal agriculture, and use of biofortification and post-harvest fortification. All these efforts to reduce hunger and malnutrition will be futile, however, without parallel efforts to mitigate rising challenges in the region, including those posed by climate change, urbanization, food loss and food waste, and food safety hazards.
Productivity and Health: Physical Activity as a Measure of Effort
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06-11) Akogun, Oladele; Dillon, Andres; Friedman, Jed; Prasann, Ashesh; Serneels, Pieter
This paper examines the relationship between physical activity and individual productivity among agricultural workers paid on a piece-rate basis. In the context studied, physical activity has a clear correspondence with worker effort. Agricultural workers’ physical activity is directly observed from accelerometer data and is robustly associated with their daily productivity. In addition the impact of a health intervention, which provides malaria testing and treatment, on physical activity and productivity, indicates that the increased daily productivity of workers who are offered this program is explained by worker effort reallocation from low-intensity to high-intensity work within a fixed time period. This demonstrates, in settings when individual productivity is observed, that physical activity measures can help disentangle productivity effects due to effort. When productivity is unobserved, physical activity measures may proxy for individual productivity in physically demanding tasks. The challenges and limitations of physical activity measurement using accelerometers is discussed including their potential use for alternative contexts and the importance of field and data analysis protocols.
Early Rainfall Shocks and Later-Life Outcomes: Evidence from Colombia
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-02) Carrillo, Bladimir
This paper uses birth cohorts spanning several hundred locations over 40 years to examine the long-term consequences of in utero exposure to abnormal rainfall events in Colombia. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in extreme droughts or floods experienced by individuals while in utero in their birth location. The results indicate that individuals prenatally exposed to adverse rainfall shocks are more likely to report serious mental illness, have fewer years of schooling, display increased rates of illiteracy, and are less likely to work. These results are larger in magnitude for individuals born in areas with a higher risk of malaria, which is consistent with the notion that exposure to infectious and parasitic diseases may play an important role.