 Health, wealth, or equity? Trade-offs from households’ allocative decisionsHelen Harris-Fry and Mario Cortina-Borja Journal of Development Economics, 2025, vol. 177, issue C Abstract: Households’ allocative decisions have potentially large implications for the health and welfare of their members. We analyze a dataset of rural Bangladeshi households to estimate: (i) a benchmark level of nutritional adequacy that households could afford by selecting different foods and reallocating them among members, and (ii) the associated trade-offs in terms of income and equity preferences. Using a novel set of non-linear health production functions, we show that households can afford adequate diets that meet the clinical needs of nearly all nutrients. Micronutrient adequacy is primarily achieved by changing household-level food choices, while caloric adequacy depends more on intra-household food allocation. We further show that households do not face a clear health-income trade-off. Instead, we find a degree of inequality aversion (for energy) and inequality preference (for micronutrients) that leads to intra-household allocations that are not fully efficient from the perspective of the production of health. Keywords: Resource allocation; Nutrition; Inequality; Health production; Bangladesh (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:177:y:2025:i:c:s0304387825001117 DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2025.103560 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier |
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