Does early nutrition predict cognitive skills during later childhood? Evidence from two developing countries

Alan Sánchez, Marta Favara, Margaret Sheridan and Jere Behrman

World Development, 2024, vol. 176, issue C

Abstract: The existing evidence linking early undernutrition to educational outcomes in developing countries is largely focused on assessing its impacts on grade attainment and achievement test scores, with limited evidence on the foundational cognitive skills required to perform well at school. We use unique data collected in Ethiopia and Peru as part of the Young Lives Study to investigate the relationship between early undernutrition and four foundational cognitive skills measured later in childhood, the first two of which measure executive functioning: working memory, inhibitory control, long-term memory, and implicit learning. We exploit the rich longitudinal data available to control for potential confounders at the household and individual level and for time-invariant community characteristics. We also take advantage of the availability of data for paired-siblings to obtain household fixed-effects estimates. In the latter specification, we find robust evidence that stunting at ∼age 5 is negatively related with executive functions measured years later, predicting reductions in working memory and inhibitory control by 12.6 % and 5.8 % of a standard deviation. Although the main cohort of Young Lives was around 12 years old when executive functions were measured, complementary results and analysis of the data available for the younger siblings suggest that the impact of stunting on executive functions—specifically, on working memory—starts at an earlier age. Our results shed light on the mechanisms that explain the relationship between early nutrition and school achievement tests suggesting that good nutrition is an important determinant of children’s learning capacities.

Keywords: Foundational cognitive skills; Early nutrition; Executive functions; Ethiopia; Peru (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2300298X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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

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

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:176:y:2024:i:c:s0305750x2300298x

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106480

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().