Robust Comparisons of Malnutrition in Developing Countries

David Sahn and David Stifel

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2002, vol. 84, issue 3, 716-735

Abstract: We use Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to make international and inter-temporal welfare comparisons. While most poverty analyses rely on expenditures or income, we use anthropometric measures of nutrition as indicators of living standards. The advantages are that we observe individual—not household—well-being, deflators and exchange rates are unnecessary, and measurement techniques are similar across surveys. We test the robustness of the headcount results, and find that applying higher order Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures adds little information; although stochastic dominance testing of nutrition distributions reveals that changes in malnutrition are sensitive to the choice of the “nutrition poverty line”. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-8276.00330 (application/pdf)
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:oup:ajagec:v:84:y:2002:i:3:p:716-735

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().