Person:
Raju, Dhushyanth
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Education,
Health,
Nutrition,
Labor,
Poverty,
Risk
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
September 15, 2023
Publication Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
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Publication
Covariate Shocks and Child Undernutrition: A Review of Evidence from Low- and Middle-Income Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)Unexpected adverse events that affect areas or populations widely (covariate shocks) can have major consequences for the welfare of a society. Although the negative effects on households, especially among the poor, are well established in the economics literature, fewer studies have focused on how natural, economic, and social covariate shocks affect individual welfare and particularly child nutrition status. This paper reviews the evidence on the effect of covariate shocks on child nutrition status in low- and middle-income countries, the pathways through which the effect operates, and the relationship between the timing of a child's exposure to a covariate shock and the effect on child nutrition status. The paper also examines whether public interventions can help to mitigate any negative effect and whether the effect of covariate shocks can persist in the long term. Based on findings from the synthesis of evidence, the paper presents considerations and options for public policy and future research. -
Publication
Pathways to Better Nutrition in South Asia: Evidence on the Effects of Food and Agricultural Interventions
(Elsevier, 2021-03)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. -
Publication
Delivering Education to the Underserved through a Public-Private Partnership Program in Pakistan
(MIT Press, 2020-12-20)We evaluate a program that recruited local entrepreneurs to open and operate new schools in 200 underserved villages in Sindh, Pakistan. School operators received a per-student subsidy to provide tuition-free primary education, and in half the villages received a higher subsidy for females. The program increased enrollment by 32 percentage points, and test scores by 0.63 standard deviations, with no difference across the two subsidy schemes. Estimating a structural model of the demand and supply for school inputs, we find that program schools selected inputs similar to those of a social planner who internalizes all the education benefits to society.