Saving lives: Evidence from a conditional food supplementation program

Stephan Litschig and Marian Meller

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: Many governments in developing countries implement programs that aim to address nutrional failures in early childhood, yet evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions is scant. This paper evaluates the impact of a conditional food supplementation program on child mortality in Ecuador. The Programa de Alimentación y Nutrición Nacional (PANN) 2000 was implemented by regular staff at local public health posts and consisted of offering a free micronutrient-fortified food, Mi Papilla, for children aged 6 to 24 months in exchange for routine health check-ups for the children. Our regression discontinuity design exploits the fact that at its inception, the PANN 2000 was running for about 8 months only in the poorest communities (parroquias) of certain provinces. Our main result is that the presence of the program reduced child mortality in cohorts with 8 months of differential exposure from a level of about 2.5 percent by 1 to 1.5 percentage points.

Keywords: early childhood nutrition; child mortality; food supplementation; regression discontinuity; Ecuador (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-08, Revised 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1304.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Saving Lives: Evidence from a Conditional Food Supplementation Program (2015)
Journal Article: Saving Lives: Evidence from a Conditional Food Supplementation Program (2014)
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:upf:upfgen:1304

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).