Nutritional status and economic development in sub-Saharan.pdf

IEHC 2006 Session 76 12/07/06 Nutritional status and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa, 1950-1980 Alexander Moradi Centre for the Study of African Economies Department of Economics, University of Oxford Postal address: Manor Road Building, Oxford OX 1 3UQ, UK Fax: ++44 (0) 1865 281447, Tel: +44 (0) 1865 281452 E-mail: alexander.moradi@economics.ox.ac.uk Keywords: nutrition, health, anthropometry, living standards, sub-Saharan Africa JEL: I 10, I30, N37 Word count : 9323 Acknowledgements I thank Joerg Baten, Gerhard Kling, John Komlos, Marco Sunder, and participants of the Economics and Human Biology Conference and CSAE Conference on Reducing Poverty and Inequality for helpful comments on earlier versions. I am also grateful for access to the Demographic and Health Survey database, kindly provided by Macro International, and especially to Stephan Klasen for his idea to use the DHS height data by birth cohorts. 1 Nutritional status and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa, 1950-1980 Abstract Nutrition and health are important dimensions of human well-being. Both aspects are complementary to income and deserve attention in its own right. However, there is an interrelationship between economic development and nutritional status which this study aims to investigate. We use a population’s mean height as an indicator of nutritional intake net of claims due to diseases. Based on more than 200,000 women from 28 sub-Saharan African countries, we find that nutritional status was in a good state in the 1960s. However, stagnating and decreasing mean heights