Does Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program improve child nutrition?

Bethelhem Debela (), Gerald Shively () and Stein Holden ()

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, 2015, vol. 7, issue 6, 1273-1289

Abstract: We studied the link between household membership in Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) and short-run nutrition outcomes among children aged 5 years and younger. We used 2006 and 2010 survey data from Northern Ethiopia to estimate parameters of an exogenous switching regression. This allowed us to measure the differential impacts of household characteristics on the weight-for-height Z-scores of children in member and non-member households. The magnitude and significance of household covariates differed in samples of children from PSNP and non-PSNP households and the supply of female labour seemed to matter for promoting child health in member households. Controlling for a set of observable features of children and households we found that children in member households had weight-for-height Z-scores that were 0.55 points higher than those of children in non-member households. We conclude that the PSNP is providing positive short-term nutritional benefits for children, especially in those households that are able to leverage underemployed female labor. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and International Society for Plant Pathology 2015

Keywords: Anthropometry; Ethiopia; Food security; Nutrition; Safety net; I15; I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12571-015-0499-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program Improve Child Nutrition? (2019)
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:spr:ssefpa:v:7:y:2015:i:6:p:1273-1289

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ulture/journal/12571

DOI: 10.1007/s12571-015-0499-9

Access Statistics for this article

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food is currently edited by R.N. Strange

More articles in Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food from Springer, The International Society for Plant Pathology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().