Although nutrition contributes to welfare in and of itself, it also contributes to individual economic productivity, as well as national income growth. The argument that improving nutrition is an investment on par with other productivity-enhancing expenditures rather than simply a form of...

This paper examines the progressivity of social sector expenditures and taxes in eight sub-Saharan African countries. It uses dominance tests to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. The paper finds that social services are poorly targeted. Among...

This paper presents an ex-ante Benefit-Cost analysis of proposed fortification of extruder rice with iron under the social safety net in India. The benefits of iron fortification are estimated in terms of economic gains from increases in current work productivity among adults and future...

Longitudinal household data can have considerable advantages over much morewidely used cross-sectional data. The collection of longitudinal data, however, may bedifficult and expensive. One problem that has concerned many analysts is that sampleattrition may make the interpretation of estimates...

Marriages between blood relatives – also known as consanguineous unions – are widespread in North Africa, Central and West Asia and most parts of South Asia. Researchers have suggested that consanguinity has adverse effects on child development, but assessing its impact is not...

Though parental education is widely perceived to be an important determinant of child nutrition outcomes, there remain significant uncertainties about whether maternal or paternal education matters most, whether there are increasing or decreasing returns to parental education, and whether these...