Malnutrition Gap as a New Measure of Child Malnutrition : A Global Application
"Leaving no one behind" is an overarching principle of the Sustainable Development Goals. Many countries are prioritizing resources for those who are furthest behind. Existing malnutrition indicators—underweight, stunting,...
| 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/396911543937034298/Malnutrition-Gap-as-a-New-Measure-of-Child-Malnutrition-A-Global-Application http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30986 |
| Summary: | "Leaving no one
behind" is an overarching principle of the
Sustainable Development Goals. Many countries are
prioritizing resources for those who are furthest behind.
Existing malnutrition indicators—underweight, stunting,
wasting, overweight, and severe wasting—are headcount
ratios. They do not capture how far behind malnourished
children are relative to the World Health Organization
growth standards. To understand the severity of
malnutrition, this study develops a new malnutrition
measurement, using the method originally developed for
estimating poverty. This study estimates the prevalence,
gap, and gap squared for stunting, wasting, overweight, and
underweight, using data from 94 developing countries over 20
years. The results show that although in most cases the
headcount measures and gap measures are moving in the same
direction, in many other cases, they are moving in opposite
directions. Moreover, employing the new measures, the study
can identify countries that have low levels of headcount for
a malnutrition measure but comparatively high severity of
malnutrition according to the gap measures, and vice versa.
This suggests that these new malnutrition measures provide
additional information on the severity of malnutrition that
is not possible to be known from headcount measures. These
new measures of the severity of malnutrition can therefore
improve the monitoring of child malnutrition across
countries, and consequently help countries to achieve their
Sustainable Development Goals. |
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