Nutrition

In light of a reinvigorated policy orientation toward agriculture in developing countries following recent dramatic developments affecting food prices and agricultural land use, public resource allocation decisionmakers ought to have access to the existing evidence from academic research on the impact of public investments related to and in support of agriculture.

Due to the predominance of direct, specific interventions in nutrition for development, the health sector tends to own nutrition, with interventions customarily implemented through health programs. The premise that the agriculture sector should also be a vehicle for improved nutrition is intuitive, but this sector often delivers neither good nutrition nor food security to the most vulnerable in the population. The complex and multisectoral nature of malnutrition may explain why it has not been effectively addressed.

Background

This paper examines the effects of early childhood nutrition on schooling inputs and outcomes to assess the dynamic nature of human capital production, using panel data from South Africa. Height-for-age Z-score is used as a measure of health and nutritional status in early childhood. Based on a comparison of siblings, this analysis concludes that improving children’s health significantly lowers the age when they start school, increases grade attainment, and decreases grade repetition in the early stage of schooling. However, this positive effect diminishes at later stages.