School milk programs and child nutrition: leveraging local governments and markets

Vivek Pandey and Elangbam Kyamba Khanganba

Food Policy, 2025, vol. 135, issue C

Abstract: The literature extensively documents the nutritional impact of School Milk Programs (SMPs) on school-going children. Nonetheless, a gap exists regarding the identification of mechanisms influencing the placement and implementation of SMPs. This paper presents new insights regarding the mediated role of local governments, parent-teacher associations (PTAs), and dairy cooperatives in connection with SMP’s association with child nutrition. This study utilizes exogenous historical variations in the establishment of village-level dairy cooperative societies and randomly assigned political reservations for women in Indian local governments to examine the relationship between SMPs and nutritional outcomes for school-going children. The findings indicate a 14.6% drop in the probability of HAZ score falling below −2σ and a 14.3% reduction in the likelihood of being underweight among the school-going children. The mediated effects of women’s reservations in local governments and the presence of PTAs on the z-scores of height-for-age and weight-for-age are 0.27σ and 0.19σ, respectively.

Keywords: Child nutrition; School milk; Local governments; Dairy markets; Instrumental variables (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919225001228
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:jfpoli:v:135:y:2025:i:c:s0306919225001228

DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102917

Access Statistics for this article

Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd

More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().