Intercommodity price transmittal : analysis offood markets in Ghana

This report expands on a dynamic model of market integration to investigate how information is transmitted across commodities. The author investigates one property of an efficient market : the full use of available information. Studies of spatial price integration simultaneously looks at the flow of information and commodities. The author investigates the flow of information within a single spatial market and the relationship between prices in spatially separate markets. He studies intercommodity price transmittal from two perspectives. First, he asks whether the government can concentrate on a single commodity price, yet achieve policy objectives in a broader arena. This is important in Ghana because no single commodity dominates consumers'food budgets. The author finds that price movements for the main cereal consumed in the country (maize) are fully transmitted to other regions. Second, he investigates the working of commodity markets in developing countries. He notes imperfections in the way markets process information. There are several possible explanations for this market inefficiency. Traders may set prices for other coarse grains in response to information about maize prices. Another possibility is that some traders may not deal in all grains and thus have different costs of acquiring information. In short the author's dynamic model of price integration indicates functional efficiency in Ghana.Access to Markets,Markets and Market Access,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Research

Food security and health security : explaining the levels of nutrition in Pakistan

Most influential studies of malnutrition and public policy have focused on energy availability and consumption, tending to equate hunger with malnutrition. But recent studies have explored how other factors - notably infection and levels of maternal education - affect nutrition. Alderman and Garcia's study of nutrition levels in Pakistan shows that raising household food consumption, for example, has less impact on nutritional levels than raising a mother's education does. They found that educating mothers to at least the primary level tends to reduce the level of child stunting 16.5 percent, or roughly 10 times the impact achieved by increasing per capita income 10 percent. (The impact of education is not immediately realized; the diffusion of knowledge about good hygiene and child care associated with learning has a cumulative effect.) Alderman and Garcia found that in Pakistan, food security alone is not enough to improve children's nutritional status. There may be welfare justifications for various food policies, but in rural Pakistan, especially, it is equally important to improve health and reduce infection.Health Economics&Finance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health,Environmental Economics&Policies,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems

Growth-promoting social safety nets:

Poverty reduction, Hunger, Poor and vulnerable, Cash transfers, Inequality, Pro-poor policies, Safety nets,

Almost Random: Evaluating a Large-Scale Randomized Nutrition Program in the Presence of Crossover

Large-scale randomized interventions have the potential to uncover the causal effect of programs applying to a large population, thereby improving on the insights gained from currently dominant smaller randomized studies. However, the external validity gained through larger interventions typically implies less supervision and often comes at the cost of some deviation from the randomization plan. This paper investigates the impact of the Nutrition Enhancement Program, which aims to improve child nutrition in Senegal based on a large-scale randomized community intervention. The analysis explicitly deals with deviation from the planned treatment and suggests approaches for combining ex-post adjustments such as propensity score matching with the randomized treatment plan. The authors do not detect a strong overall program impact on the outcome measure of weight-for-age based on planned treatment status, but do find an impact on the youngest children. Moreover, the project impact is clearer when the analysis considers treatment crossover using alternative estimators of two-stage least-squares and propensity score matching. The findings underscore the importance of addressing the shortcomings of large-scale randomization interventions in a systematic manner in order to understand the selection process that can guide further implementation of such projects, as well as to expose the true, causal effect of such programs.Nutrition; Impact evaluation

The"Glass of Milk"subsidy program and malnutrition in Peru

The authors evaluate the Vaso de Leche (VL) feeding program in Peru. They pose the question that if a community-based multistage targeting scheme such as that of the VL program is progressive, is it possible that the program can achieve its nutritional objectives? The authors address this by linking VL public expenditure data with household survey data to assess the targeting, and then to model the determinants of nutritional outcomes of children to see if VL program interventions have an impact on nutrition. They confirm that the VL program is well targeted to poor households and to those with low nutritional status. While the bulk of the coverage of the poor is attributed to targeting of poor districts, the fact that the poor receive larger in-kind transfers is attributed to intradistrict targeting. But the impactof these food subsidies beyond their value as income transfers is limited by the degree to which the commodity transfers are inframarginal. The authors find that transfers of milk and milk substitutes from the VL program are inframarginal for approximately half of the households that receive them. So, it is not entirely surprising that they fail to find econometric evidence of the nutritional objectives of the VL program being achieved. In models of child standardized heights, the authors find no impact of the VL program expenditures on the nutritional outcomes of young children-the group to whom the program is targeted.Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Services&Transfers to Poor,Public Health Promotion,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Housing&Human Habitats,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction,Safety Nets and Transfers,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Poverty Impact Evaluation

Reducing Child Malnutrition in Tanzania\ud Combined Effects of Income Growth and Program Interventions

\ud Malnutrition is associated with an inadequate diet, poor health and sanitation services and insufficient care for young children. A combination of income growth and nutrition interventions are therefore suggested to adequately tackle this issue (Haddad et al. 2003), yet evidence to support this claim is often not available, especially for African settings. This paper evaluates the joint contribution of income growth and nutrition interventions towards the reduction of malnutrition. Using a four round panel data set from northwestern Tanzania we estimate the determinants of a child’s nutritional status, including household income and the presence of nutrition interventions in the community. The results show that better nutrition is associated with higher income, and that nutrition interventions have a substantial beneficial effect. Policy simulations make clear that if one intends to halve malnutrition rates by 2015 (the MDG objective), income growth will have to be complemented\ud by large scale program interventions.\u

Eradicating malnutrition income growth or nutrition programs?: essay from IFPRI's 1999-2000 Annual Report

Recent research from IFPRI and its partners shows the potential for income growth to improve nutritional status. Encouragingly, income growth indeed contributes to improved nutritional status in 12 countries studied. The authors show how nutrition programs can reduce malnutrition faster, how better nutrition will raise income. They conclude that income affects nutrition, and nutrition in turn affects income. This can be a vicious circle or a virtuous one. Poverty reduction and effective direct nutrition interventions are needed to move us from the vicious to the virtuous.Malnutrition., Nutritional status, income growth, Nutrition programs, Poverty alleviation,

Estimates of Consumer Price Response in Pakistan using Market Prices as Data

The main emphasis of the paper is to illustrate a methodology that can be readily applied to future data analysis. The results presented here indicate that plausible and detailed estimates of consumer response to price changes can be obtained using household expenditure survey sand published price series in a manner that does not require the assumptions of additive preferences. It is noted that a fixed-effects. approach which sweeps out spatial long-run price differences can be employed as a replicated time series even over a limited period of four quarter

Preschool Nutrition and Subsequent Schooling Attainment: Longitudinal Evidence from Tanzania

This study analyses how childhood health determines future academic performance in Kagera region in Tanzania. Academic outcomes considered are years of education and delay in enrollment, while the measure of childhood health is (relative to the median) height. The repercussions of malnutrition in childhood on subsequent learning and school performance are analyzed by using a unique longitudinal dataset. Result indicate the degree to which malnutrition leads to reduced lifetime earning capacity due to both delays in schooling and declines in total schooling

Long-term consequences of early childhood malnutrition

"This paper examines the impact of preschool malnutrition on subsequent human capital formation in rural Zimbabwe using a maternal fixed effects-instrumental variables (MFE-IV) estimator with a long-term panel data set. Representations of civil war and drought 'shocks' are used to identify differences in preschool nutritional status across siblings. Improvements in height-for-age in preschoolers are associated with increased height as a young adult and number of grades of schooling completed. Had the median preschool child in this sample had the stature of a median child in a developed country, by adolescence, she would be 4.6 centimeters taller and would have completed an additional 0.7 grades of schooling." Authors' AbstractCivil war Africa ,