 Population policy, family size and child malnutrition in Vietnam – Testing the trade-off between child quantity and quality from a child nutrition perspectiveQihui Chen () Economics & Human Biology, 2021, vol. 41, issue C Abstract: This paper estimates the quantity-quality (QQ) trade-off of children from a child nutrition perspective, using data on 2000 children born in 2001–2002 from the Young Lives project in Vietnam. Using the sex of the first-born in the family as an instrumental variable for family size, we found that having an additional sibling lowers a 5-year-old Vietnamese child’s height-for-age and weight-for-age Z scores by 0.3 and 0.26 standard deviations (SDs), respectively. This finding is robust to a series of checks, providing strong evidence of the quantity-quality trade-off of children. In more policy-relevant terms, our estimates suggest that the violation of Vietnam’s Two-Child policy (i.e., having more than two children) may have caused reductions in 5-year-old Vietnamese children’s height-for-age and weight-for-age by, respectively, 0.49 and 0.57 SDs. Keywords: Population policy; Family size; Nutritional status; Son-preference; Vietnam (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:ehbiol:v:41:y:2021:i:c:s1570677x21000071 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2021.100983 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 |
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