Child Undernutrition in India

Raghav Gaiha, Raghbendra Jha and Vani S. Kulkarni

ASARC Working Papers from The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre

Abstract: We have constructed a composite indicator of anthropometric failure (CIAF) that refines the Waterlow-3 tier classification, using a recent nation-wide household survey. The CIAF and its disaggregation into subcategories of undernourished 5 years old children reveal a grimmer story of child undernutrition than conventional anthropometric indicators do. Besides, simultaneous occurrence of anthropometric failures (e.g. stunting and underweight, and stunting, wasting and underweight) is pervasive. Our analysis of determinants of CIAF yields some new insights-specifically, the important role of food prices. Investigation of the links between different anthropometric failures and prevalence of infectious diseases (viz. Diarrhoea and acute respiratory infection), however, offers some justification for the disaggregated classification of undernourished children used here. Specifically, those with more than one failure were worse-off in this respect than children with no failure. There is a strong case for income growth together with food price stabilisation in curbing child undernutrition. Education has the desired effect but it is less strong than expected. Improvement in the quality of home environment makes a difference too but it is not conditional on income or wealth alone.

Keywords: stunting; wasting; underweight; poverty; infectious diseases; and mortality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D60 I10 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev and nep-hea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/acde/asarc/pdf/papers/2010/WP2010_11.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:pas:asarcc:2010-11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ASARC Working Papers from The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Raghbendra Jha ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).