Growing richer and taller: Explaining change in the distribution of child nutritional status during Vietnam's economic boomOwen O'Donnell, Ángel López Nicolás and Eddy Van Doorslaer Journal of Development Economics, 2009, vol. 88, issue 1, 45-58 Abstract: Over a five-year period in the 1990s Vietnam experienced annual economic growth of more than 8% and a 15 point decrease in the proportion of children chronically malnourished (stunted). We estimate the extent to which changes in the distribution of child nutritional status can be explained by changes in the level and distribution of income, and of other covariates. This is done using data from the 1993 and 1998 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys and a flexible decomposition technique based on quantile regression that explains change throughout the complete distribution of child height. One-half of the decrease in the proportion of children stunted is explained by changes in the distributions of covariates and 35% is explained by change in the distribution of income. Covariates, including income, explain less of the decrease in very severe malnutrition, which is largely attributable to change in the conditional distribution of child height. Keywords: I12; I31; O53; Malnutrition; Child; height; Decomposition; Quantile; regression; Vietnam (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:88:y:2009:i:1:p:45-58 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier |
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