 Early childhood nutrition and academic achievementPaul Glewwe, Hanan Jocoby and Elizabeth King No 68, FCND discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Abstract: Early childhood nutrition is thought to be an important input into subsequent academic achievement. This paper investigates the nutrition-learning nexus using a unique longitudinal data set, which follows a large sample of Philippine children from birth until the end of their primary education. We find that malnourished children perform more poorly in school, even after correcting for the effects of unobserved heterogeneity both across and within households. Part of the advantage that well-nourished children enjoy arises from the fact that they enter school earlier and thus have more time to learn. The rest of their advantage appears to stem from greater learning productivity per year of schooling rather than from greater learning effort in the form of homework time, school attendance, and so forth. Despite these findings, our analysis suggests that the relationship between nutrition and learning is not likely to be of overriding importance either for nutrition policy or in accounting for economic growth. Keywords: Gender; households; Human Nutrition.; Malnutrition in children.; Education; Primary Philippines.; Philippines. (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:fpr:fcnddp:68 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in FCND discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC. |
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