One of the major components of the PROGRESA program has been directed toward improving the nutritional status of small children in poor rural communities in Mexico. Results suggest that PROGRESA may be having fairly substantial effects on lifetime productivities and earnings of currently small children in poor households.Nutrition. ,

Behrman, Jere R.

Hoddinott, John

English

Research Papers in Economics

 
Discussion Paper 104 
An Evaluation of the Impact of PROGRESA on 
Preschool Child Height 
Jere R. Behrman and John Hoddinott 
 
he nutrition of preschool children is of 
considerable interest not only because of 
concern over their immediate welfare, but 
also because their nutrition in this formative 
stage of life is widely perceived to have 
substantial persistent impact on their physical 
and mental development and on their health 
status as adults. Children’s physical and mental 
development shape their later lives by affecting 
their schooling success and post-schooling 
productivity. Improving the nutritional status of 
currently malnourished preschoolers may, 
therefore, have important payoffs over the long 
term. Within rural Mexico, stunting, or short 
height relative to standards established for 
healthy populations, is the major form of 
protein-energy malnutrition (PEM). Low weight 
for height, or wasting, is much less of a 
problem. But stunting is symptomatic of longer-
term effects of early childhood malnutrition. 
 
Why Take a Second Look at PROGRESA’s 
Apparent Failure to Improve Children’s 
Nutritional Status? 
One of the major components 
of the PROGRESA program 
has been directed toward 
improving the nutritional 
status of children in poor 
rural communities in Mexico. 
Cross-sectional comparisons 
of height for children who received 
PROGRESA treatment with others who were in 
PROGRESA-eligible households but who did 
not receive treatment suggest no positive effect 
of PROGRESA, either on average child height 
or on the proportion of children who are stunted, 
i.e., more than two standard deviations below 
recognized norms. But these comparisons may 
be misleading, because of the failure to control 
for unobserved child, parental and household, 
and market and community characteristics that 
may be correlated with children receiving the 
PROGRESA treatment or because of the failure 
to control for systematic initial differences. For 
example, on average, the children in the control 
sample tended to have better anthropometric 
status than children in the treatment sample. 
 
What Apparent Impact Has PROGRESA Had 
When Controlling for Unobserved 
Differences? 
The preferred estimates used in this study 
control for these factors. PROGRESA treatment 
is represented by those who reportedly received 
nutritional supplements in the treatment group 
(less than 60 percent of children in the treatment 
group) for children in the critical age range of 
12 to 36 months. These estimates find 
significant effects of receiving PROGRESA 
treatment in increasing child growth and 
reducing the probability of child stunting. These 
estimates imply an 
increase of about 
one-sixth in mean 
growth per year for 
these children, and 
perhaps somewhat 
greater for children 
from poorer house-
holds and poorer communities but whose 
household heads are more educated. 
 
Why Is This Impact Noteworthy? 
This is a potentially important effect: under the 
assumptions that (1) there is strong persistence 
of changes in small children’s anthropometric 
development  so that  the percentage changes for  
T
 
Discussion Paper BRIEFS 
Food Consumption and Nutrition Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute 
While the estimates are speculative, 
they do suggest that PROGRESA may 
have substantial effects on lifetime 
productivity and earnings of preschool 
children in poor households.  
adults equal those (are half of those) that we 
estimate for children and (2) that adult 
anthropometric-earnings relations from else-
where in Latin America apply to the labor 
markets in which these children will be working 
as adults, the impact from this effect alone 
would be a 2.9 percent (1.4 percent) increase in 
lifetime earnings. In addition, there are likely to 
be other effects through increased cognitive 
development, increased schooling, and lowered 
age of completing given levels of schooling 
through starting when younger and passing 
successfully grades at a higher rate. While these 
estimates remain fairly speculative, they suggest 
that PROGRESA may have substantial effects 
on lifetime productivity and earnings of 
preschool children in poor households.  
 
Recent FCND Discussion Papers 
 
Targeting the Poor in Mexico: An Evaluation of the 
Selection of Households for PROGRESA, 
Emmanuel Skoufias, Benjamin Davis, and 
Sergio de la Vega, March 2001 DP103 
School Subsidies for the Poor: Evaluating a 
Mexican Strategy for Reducing Poverty, T. Paul 
Schultz, March 2001 DP102 
Poverty, Inequality, and Spillover in Mexico’s 
Education, Health, and Nutrition Program, 
Sudhanshu Handa, Mari-Carmen Huerta, Raul 
Perez, and Beatriz Straffon, March 2001 DP101 
On the Targeting and Redistributive Efficiencies of 
Alternative Transfer Instruments, David Coady 
and Emmanuel Skoufias, February 2001 DP100 
Cash Transfer Programs with Income Multipliers: 
PROCAMPO in Mexico, Elisabeth Sadoulet, 
Alain de Janvry, Benjamin Davis, January 2001 
DP99 
Participation and Poverty Reduction: Issues, 
Theory, and New Evidence from South Africa, 
John Hoddinott, Michelle Adato, Tim Besley, 
Lawrence Haddad, January 2001 DP98 
Socioeconomic Differentials in Child Stunting Are 
Consistently Larger in Urban Than in Rural 
Areas, Purnima Menon, Marie T. Ruel, Saul S. 
Morris, December 2000 DP97 
Attrition in Longitudinal Household Survey Data: 
Some Tests for Three Developing-Country 
Samples, Harold Alderman, Jere R. Behrman, 
Hans-Peter Kohler, John A. Maluccio, Susan 
Cotts Watkins, October 2000 DP96 
Attrition in the Kwazulu Natal Income Dynamics 
Study 1993-1998, John Maluccio, October 2000 
DP95 
Targeting Urban Malnutrition: A Multi-City 
Analysis of the Spatial Distribution of Childhood 
Nutritional Status, Saul Sutkover Morris, 
September 2000 DP94 
 
Keywords: Mexico, nutrition, poverty 
intervention 
 
 
 
 
The full text of this document and other FCND Discussion Papers are available on our Website 
(www.ifpri.org/divs/fcnd/dp.htm) or via B.McClafferty@cgiar.org 
 
 
 
FCND BRIEFS 
 
International 
Food 
Policy 
Research 
Institute 
 
 
2033 K Street, N.W. 
Washington, D.C. 20006 U.S.A. 
 
While the estimates are speculative, they do suggest that 
PROGRESA may have substantial effects on lifetime 
productivity and earnings of preschool children in poor 
households.–DP104 

An evaluation of the impact of PROGRESA on pre-school child height

http://www.ifpri.org/sites/default/files/publications/fcnbr104.pdf

An evaluation of the impact of PROGRESA on pre-school child height

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