The Aggregate Income Losses from Childhood Stunting and the Returns to a Nutrition Intervention Aimed at Reducing Stunting
This paper undertakes two calculations, one for all developing countries, the other for 34 developing countries that together account for 90 percent of the world's stunted children. The first calculation asks how much lower a country's pe...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/528901533144584145/The-aggregate-income-losses-from-childhood-stunting-and-the-returns-to-a-nutrition-intervention-aimed-at-reducing-stunting http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30108 |
| Summary: | This paper undertakes two calculations,
one for all developing countries, the other for 34
developing countries that together account for 90 percent of
the world's stunted children. The first calculation
asks how much lower a country's per capita income is
today as a result of some of its workers having been stunted
in childhood. The analysis uses a development accounting
framework, relying on micro-econometric estimates of the
effects of childhood stunting on adult wages, through the
effects on years of schooling, cognitive skills, and height,
parsing out the relative contribution of each set of returns
to avoid double counting. The estimates show that, on
average, the per capita income penalty from stunting is
around 7 percent. The second calculation estimates the
economic value and the costs associated with scaling up a
package of nutrition interventions using the same
methodology and set of assumptions used in the first
calculation. The analysis considers a package of 10
nutrition interventions for which data are available on the
effects and costs. The estimated rate-of-return from
gradually introducing this program over a period of 10 years
in the 34 countries is17 percent, and the corresponding
benefit-cost ratio is 15:1. |
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