Changes in child height and open defecation in rural India: Understanding improvements between the two most recent demographic surveys

Sangita Vyas and Anna Vera

Economics & Human Biology, 2025, vol. 57, issue C

Abstract: Rural Indian children are exceptionally short by international standards. However, between 2015-16 and 2019-21, the average rural child’s height increased by about one-fifth of a standard deviation, a more rapid increase than previous years. Over this same period of time, reported open defecation in rural India reduced dramatically from 55% of households to 27% of households, in part because of a large government program that subsidized the construction of latrines. This paper studies the extent to which the reduction in open defecation can statistically account for the increase in child height over this period of time. Using a linear decomposition similar to Blinder-Oaxaca, that controls for fixed differences across districts and changes in other environmental exposures and economic status within districts, we find that the reduction in open defecation accounts for about one-fifth of the improvement in child height over this period of time. The improvement in the disease environment contributed to a small but important increase in child height, yet children in India are still short by international standards and much open defecation remains.

Keywords: Child height; Sanitation; India; Blinder-oaxaca decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X25000176
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:ehbiol:v:57:y:2025:i:c:s1570677x25000176

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2025.101484

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().