Improvements in children’s health: Does inequality matter?

David Sahn and Stephen Younger ()

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2005, vol. 3, issue 2, 125-143

Abstract: The literature on the contributions to poverty reduction of average improvements in living standards vs. distributional changes uses only one measure of well-being – income or expenditure. Given that poverty is defined by deprivation over different dimensions, we explore the role of average improvements and distributional changes in children’s health and nutrition using the height of young children as our measure of well-being. Similar to the income literature, we find that shifts in the mean level of heights, not changes in distribution, account for most improvements in heights. Unlike the literature on income inequality, however, there is a positive association between improvements in average heights and reduced dispersion of those heights. Copyright Springer 2005

Keywords: distribution; health and nutrition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10888-005-4494-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jecinq:v:3:y:2005:i:2:p:125-143

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... th/journal/10888/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-005-4494-9

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Inequality is currently edited by Stephen Jenkins

More articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality from Springer, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().