Nutritional Inequality and Policy Targeting in South Asia

Caitlin Brown, Eeshani Kandpal, Jean Lee and Anaise Williams

Population and Development Review, 2026, vol. 52, issue 2, 441-477

Abstract: How much intra‐household inequality is there in nutritional outcomes, and what does this mean for policy targeting? Using Demographic and Health Survey data for the South Asia region, we show that two‐thirds of undernourished individuals live in households with others who are not undernourished. Within‐household inequality contributes almost as much to overall nutritional inequality as between‐household inequality. While wealth is significantly correlated with undernourishment, only half of all undernourished individuals are found in the poorest 40 percent of households. Even in the wealthiest households, 10 percent of adults and 15 percent of children are undernourished. Adding additional covariates, such as birth order, adult education, and those related to household sanitation infrastructure, does little to improve the predictive power of individual nutritional status. As a result, accurately targeting undernourished individuals using household‐ or community‐level observables is likely to be difficult. We find that straightforward outcomes such as age or access to sanitation infrastructure do as well as household wealth at targeting undernourishment; yet all the targeting methods we consider yield large inclusion and exclusion errors, raising questions as to whether nutrition interventions should be targeted.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.70035

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:bla:popdev:v:52:y:2026:i:2:p:441-477

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0098-7921

Access Statistics for this article

Population and Development Review is currently edited by Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll

More articles in Population and Development Review from The Population Council, Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().