Hunger and Health: Reexamining the Impact of Household Food Insecurity on Child Malnutrition in India

Gaurav Dhamija, Manini Ojha and Punarjit Roychowdhury

Journal of Development Studies, 2022, vol. 58, issue 6, 1181-1210

Abstract: Child malnutrition is remarkably high in India. The problem of food insecurity is also extremely alarming in the country. From a policy perspective, a question of paramount importance in this context is: are these two problems inter-related? Answering this question based on existing literature is difficult. This is because literature examining specifically the effect of food insecurity on child / adolescent malnutrition in India is scarce. Besides, the small number of studies that do examine this question empirically find mixed evidence. In light of this, here we reexamine the effect of food insecurity on child malnutrition using data from the Young Lives survey. Employing several contemporary econometric approaches, we not only estimate the mean effect but also the distributional effects of food insecurity on child malnutrition. We find evidence of sizeable negative average effects of food insecurity on children’s anthropometric indices for nutrition surveillance including weight-for-age z score (WAZ) and height-for-age z-score (HAZ). Further, we document important heterogeneity in the effect of food insecurity on children’s WAZ and HAZ across the outcome-distributions. Our results suggest that expansion of policies that could effectively reduce household food insecurity is vital to address the problem of malnutrition among Indian children.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220388.2022.2029419 (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:taf:jdevst:v:58:y:2022:i:6:p:1181-1210

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FJDS20

DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2022.2029419

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Studies is currently edited by Howard White, Oliver Morrissey and Ken Shadlen

More articles in Journal of Development Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().