Unequal Households or Communities? : Decomposing the Inequality in Nutritional Status in South Asia
Half of all undernourished women and children in South Asia are not found in the bottom 40 percent of wealth-poor households. This paper quantifies the extent to which this inequality in nutritional status arises within households versus between ho...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC:
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099716404192212734/IDU074c917ff0c32104aa609d120265e250aa57f http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37333 |
| Summary: | Half of all undernourished women and
children in South Asia are not found in the bottom 40
percent of wealth-poor households. This paper quantifies the
extent to which this inequality in nutritional status arises
within households versus between households. In contrast to
previous literature, it shows that between-household
inequality explains 3.5 times as much of the variation as
does inequality within households. Within the household,
gender, age, and birth order are key correlates of
nutritional outcomes. At the household level and accounting
for community-level factors, both an index of sanitation
infrastructure and the presence of an improved toilet matter
independently to household wealth for nutritional outcomes.
The paper concludes with a comparison of the effectiveness
of targeting undernourishment using household wealth, a
community sanitation infrastructure index, and, separately,
the proportion of improved toilets in a community. The
findings show that access to improved toilets, despite its
relative simplicity, performs almost as well as household
wealth and better than the community sanitation index. These
findings highlight that (a) inequality between households
within the same communities is an overlooked but important
driver of inequality in nutritional status, and (b)
community-level sanitation infrastructure may be a better
indicator of nutritional status than more complicated
household-level targeting measures. |
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