On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India

Lead Research Organisation: University of Manchester
Department Name: Social Sciences

Abstract

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Description Despite spectacular economic growth in India, undernourishment is still one of the major concerns, as is characterised by slow progress of anthropometric indicators of both children and adult nutrition indicators in recent years. Drawing upon various rounds of three different sets of national household survey data (NFHS, NCAER and NSS) covering the period from 1992 to 2006, our study has shed new empirical light on the determinants of adult and children nutritional status in terms of anthropometric indicators as well as the effectiveness of rural public works in reducing undernutrition.
The first paper (Imai et al., 2014a) has tested two hypotheses; the activity hypothesis postulating that activity intensity affects adult nutrition in terms of BMI and the poverty nutrition trap hypothesis predicting that that low undernutrition acting as a barrier to labour market participation. Our results strongly support both hypotheses. First, after taking account of the sample selection bias associated with the labour market participation and the endogeneity of wages, those who are left out from the labour market or experience lower wages tend to have lower levels of nutrition in terms of BMI. That is, there exists a poverty nutrition trap associated with the labour market participation. Second, our estimates show that those who are doing manual labour or more physically intensive and demanding activities are more likely to be undernourished than those who are doing less intensive activities. Both results would explain why the improvement of BMI has been relatively slow at all the ranges of nutritional groups. At the low end of the income distribution, people would need to enter into the labour market and earn wages to escape poverty. Additionally, even when they manage to find jobs, low wages and/or physically demanding jobs would prevent them from improving nutritional conditions. Only if they are able to earn higher wages, enter into jobs which would require less physically demanding work and/or are self-employed possibly with higher education, they would be able to improve their nutritional conditions.
The second paper (Imai et al., 2014b) investigates the determinants of child nutritional status and finds that the relative bargaining index defined as the share of mother's schooling years over father's schooling years positively and significantly influences z scores of 'weight-for-age' and 'weight-for-height'- short-term measures of nutritional status of children. The results of quantile regression (QR) suggest, however, that the bargaining power will improve a chronic measure of nutritional status, or 'height-for-age' at the low end of conditional distribution of z score or those stunted. We have also found that access to health scheme or health insurance - which is instrumented by a proxy for infrastructure - improves 'weight-for-age' in 2005-6. Health-related facility, infrastructure and environment are also found to be important factors in reducing the prevalence of child malnutrition. The results of QR imply that access to radio and TV is important for improving the measures of 'stunting' and 'underweight' particularly at the lower parts of the conditional distribution. Also, children belonging to scheduled caste are more likely to be undernourished.
Exploitation Route To our knowledge, Imai et al. (2014a, b) are the first to estimate the determinants of nutritional status of adults and children in India by applying advanced econometric techniques to all 3 rounds of NFHS data as well as 2 rounds of NCAER data over the period in 1992-2006, as much of the extant literature has used only one round of data or field survey data in a limited area. This is important as any conclusion based on a single data set at a particular point of time is subject to, e.g., a macro shock commonly affecting all the sample households. The results have been discussed with academics widely - in India (University of Delhi; Centre for Studies in Social Science, Kolkata; University of Calcutta), UK (Oxford; Sussex; Nottingham; Glasgow), US (UCRS; Rutgers; Harvard School of Public Health, and MIT's Poverty Action Lab), Australia (ANU; Monash), and China (Renmin University of China). Our papers have been also circulated among policy makers to have wider economic and social impacts - including IFAD; FAO; World Food Programme; World Bank; Asian Development Bank; UNDP; Unicef; National Rural Health Mission, Government of West Bengal; and Pratichi India Trust (India).
Sectors Agriculture, Food and Drink,Creative Economy,Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice,Other
URL http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Katsushi.Imai/
 
Description After the ESRC End of Award Report was submitted in 2012, we have aimed to maximise both academic and non-academic impacts of the project. One of the main outputs entitled "Women's Empowerment and Prevalence of Stunted and Underweight Children in Rural India" was published in World Development (Vol. 62(10), 88-105, October 2014) after we had incorporated various suggestions of the managing editor and three reviewers, one of whom is a non-academic policymaker. The paper investigated the effects of mother's empowerment on children's nutritional status using the three rounds of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data in India. It showed how mothers' empowerment will help improve their children's nutritional status in the context of rural India. World Development is the top development studies journal and is widely read among academic researchers, policymakers and practitioners. Our article was among the most frequently downloaded ones in this journal (1078 times between July 2014 and June 2015). Prof. Raghav Gaiha, an international consultant and currently a Visiting Scientist at Harvard School of Public Health, circulated the paper among his colleagues and explained to them why more than income or assets women's empowerment is key to improving child malnutrition in India. Prof. Canning, a leading demographer and currently leading a study on child malnutrition, has decided to moderate his focus on income growth and child malnutrition. He has shared this study with other members of his team and our findings will be reflected in the revised version of this study, and others on Ethiopia and Sri Lanka. The team consisting of Dr Katsushi Imai (a principal investigator, University of Manchester, UK), Prof. Raghav Gaiha, Dr Veena Kulkarni (an international consultant, Arkansas State University, USA), Dr Samuel Annim (an international consultant, University of Cape Coast, Ghana) has tried to maximise the non-academic impact by various measures. In June 2015, we published a short article entitled "Women's empowerment and child malnutrition in rural India" in Ideas for India, published online by the International Growth Centre (IGC), funded by UKaid from the Department for International Development (http://www.ideasforindia.in/article.aspx?article_id=1461). This was featured by the blog of IGC (http://www.theigc.org/blog/womens-empowerment-and-child-malnutrition-in-rural-india/). This has attracted the attention of not just researchers but also policy makers. A copy was sent to the Prime Minister's office in New Delhi which is greatly concerned with improving child malnutrition. Much earlier, we organised a press release from this ESRC project, entitled "Economic Growth will not feed the hungry, say researchers" through the press office of the University of Manchester in December 2012. This press release was featured by a number of media (e.g. Medical Express, or Indian Finance) and our research findings have been shared with policymakers and non-academics. This is available on the websites of Physs.org (http://phys.org/news/2012-12-economic-growth-hungry.html) and the University of Manchester (http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/article/?id=9175). This dissemination was effective as we have received a number of formal and informal inquiries about the research findings and the methodologies. Research papers have been presented at international conferences and workshops after the end of the project. For instance, the principal investigator, Dr Katsushi Imai (Manchester) organised a one-day workshop on Poverty and Inequality in China and India, at the University of Manchester, on 13 March 2012 by inviting Professor John Knight from Oxford University as a keynote speaker. Senior officers of the Save the Children and DFID were also invited. Dr Imai presented the key findings of our ESRC project at the Workshop. The results on India are placed in a broader context of India and China and subsequently, Dr Katsushi Imai (Manchester) and Prof. Raghav Gaiha (Harvard) have extended the analysis in the context of China with a separate funding (You, J., Imai, K. S., and Gaiha, R. (2015) 'Declining nutrient intake in a growing China: Does household heterogeneity matter?' RIEB Discussion Paper Series DP2015-20, Research Institute for Economics & Business Administration, Kobe University, Revised and Resubmitted to World Development). The papers based on the project have been presented by investigators at Kansai Research Group on Development Microeconomcis (KDME) Seminar in Osaka in July 2012 (by Dr Imai), Population Association of America (PAA) 2013 Annual Meeting in New Orleans in April 2013 (by Dr Veena Kulkarni, an international consultant), India Human Development Survey User Conference in Delhi in June 2013 (by Dr Kulkarni). These events drew both academics and non-academics and the results were presented and discussed in considerable detail and generally highly appreciated. Our papers have been circulated among academics widely - in India (University of Delhi; Centre for Studies in Social Science, Kolkata; University of Calcutta), UK (Oxford; Sussex; Nottingham; Glasgow), US (UCRS; Rutgers; Harvard School of Public Health, and MIT's Poverty Action Lab), Australia (ANU; Monash), and China (Renmin University of China). They have also been circulated among policy makers to have wider economic and social impacts - including IFAD; FAO; World Food Programme; World Bank; Asian Development Bank; UNDP; Unicef; National Rural Health Mission, Government of West Bengal; and Pratichi India Trust in India. Another main paper entitled 'Nutrition, Activity Intensity and Wage Linkages: Evidence from India' (The School of Economics Discussion Paper Series 1411, The University of Manchester, UK) has been revised after we submitted it to one of the top economics journals. This paper tested the twin hypotheses, namely, (a) the poverty nutrition trap hypothesis that wages affect nutritional status, and (b) the activity hypothesis that activity intensity affects adult nutrition as measured by the Body Mass Index (BMI) in the context of India. The analyses draw upon three rounds of NFHS data in 1992, 1998 and 2005 and National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) data in 2005. The paper showed that physically intensive activity tends to worsen the nutritional conditions and there is evidence for a poverty nutrition trap associated with labour market participation. Following three referees' reports of the journal, we are now in the middle of revising the paper. First, we are trying to make the results more robust by implementing the new method (i.e. unconditional, rather than conditional, quantile regression, following Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2009) (Econometrica, Vol. 77(3), 953-973) to evaluate the impact of changes in the distribution of the explanatory variables on quantiles of the unconditional (marginal) distribution of an outcome variable. Second, to address the issue of imperfect instrument, we are implementing the new method, called IIV (Imperfect Instrumental Variable) to derive the possible ranges (rather than a point estimate) of the coefficient estimate of endogenous regressors by (i) allowing the instrumental variable to be correlated with the error term, but (ii) assuming the correlation between the instrumental variable and the error term has the same sign as the correlation between the endogenous regressor and the error term and that the instrumental variable is less correlated with the error term than is the endogenous regressor (e.g. wage) (Nevo and Rosen, 2012, 'Identification with Imperfect Instruments' The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 94(3): 659-671). It is expected that the revised version will be published in 2016. Once the paper is finalised, we plan to organise another media release to maximise the academic and non-academic of our research. These extensions are carried out to make our research findings more robust and our key findings are likely to be the same. Our papers will become pivotal references among academic researchers who work on poverty, health, and nutrition in India and developing countries given the richness of the data as well as an innovative use of recent econometric techniques and the importance of conclusions.
First Year Of Impact 2012
Sector Agriculture, Food and Drink,Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice,Other
Impact Types Societal,Economic,Policy & public services
 
Description Economic growth will not feed the hungry, say ESRC-funded researchers 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact This is press release fom the Press Office at the University of Manchester. This has been covered widely by domestic and international media. This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. It was released on 4th December 2012 from the Press office, the University of Manchester.

This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. It was released on 4th December 2012 from the Press office, the University of Manchester.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
URL http://twitter.com/ESRC/status/278082219870937088
 
Description Economic growth will not feed the hungry, say researchers 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact This is press release fom the Press Office at the University of Manchester. This has been covered widely by domestic and international media. This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. It was released on 4th December 2012 from the Press office, the University of Manchester.

This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. It was released on 4th December 2012 from the Press office, the University of Manchester.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
URL http://esciencenews.com/sources/physorg/2012/12/04/economic.growth.will.not.feed.hungry.say.research...
 
Description Economic growth will not feed the hungry, say researchers 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? Yes
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact This is press release fom the Press Office at the University of Manchester. This has been covered widely by domestic and international media. This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. It was released on 4th December 2012 from the Press office, the University of Manchester.

This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. It was released on 4th December 2012 from the Press office, the University of Manchester.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2012
URL http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=9175
 
Description Reducing malnutrition in rural India 
Form Of Engagement Activity A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview
Part Of Official Scheme? Yes
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact This is policy briefings produced by Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI), the University of Manchester which is called 'worldpoverty@manchester' (http://www.bwpi.manchester.ac.uk/resources/world-poverty/index.html). The main findings of the ESRC project has been summarised in non-technical terms and it has been widely distributed among policy makers in both developed and developing countries. This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. Based on this, presss release has been produced on 4th December 2012.

This is a public release from the ESRC project RES-000-22-4028, On the Change of Poverty and Undernutrition in Rural India. Based on this, presss release has been produced on 4th December 2012.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2010
URL http://www.bwpi.manchester.ac.uk/resources/world-poverty/index.html