Gender Differences in Child Malnutrition in Ethiopia: Evidence from Three Decomposition Techniques

Meijuan Wang, Denis Nadolnyak and Valentina Hartarska

Research in Applied Economics, 2021, vol. 13, issue 3, 67-94

Abstract: Ethiopia has one of the highest under-five child mortality rate in the world, which is higher for boys than for girls. Malnutrition is a major contributing factor to child mortality and that is why we assess the differences in child malnutrition status of boys and girls. Specifically, we study the extent to which the gender differences in malnutrition are associated with observable factors and socio-economic characteristics and to what extent these differences are unexplained and attributable to factors such as latent parental preferences, societal biases, and other unobservable factors. We use data from the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey and evaluate three anthropometric status measures ¨C wasting, stunting, and being underweight. We utilize a reduced-form demand for nutrition framework and several decomposition techniques: Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition for non-linear models, Machado-Mata quantile decomposition, and the recentered influence function. The results indicate that measurable socioeconomic and locational characteristics have significant and plausible associations with malnutrition by gender. We also find that 3% to 4% of the difference in the anthropometric status may be attributable to unobservable factors that may include implicit parental preferences. This approach is useful in evaluating gender differences in other human capital development outcomes such as health and education, as well as those in malnutrition.

Keywords: malnutrition; Ethiopia; gender differences; non-linear Oaxaca¨CBlinder decomposition; Machado¨CMata quantile decomposition; re-centered influence function decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/rae/article/view/19056/14817 (application/pdf)
https://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/rae/article/view/19056 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mth:raee88:v:13:y:2021:i:3:p:67-94

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Applied Economics is currently edited by Amy Li

More articles in Research in Applied Economics from Macrothink Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Technical Support Office ().