Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Oportunidades was an innovative anti-poverty program that put additional resources in the hands of women and their families and encouraged parents to invest in the human capital of their children. This program was the first in its kind, and early evaluations demonstrating its success informed its large expansion within Mexico and the implementation of similar conditional cash transfer programs across the world. However, the existing evidence, which arguably captures causal positive impacts, relies on a sample of very poor rural children. This paper conducts the first evaluation of the program using representative data. It focuses on child height as a marker of long-term nutritional status. The causal impact of the program on child height is isolated by exploiting insights from the biology of child growth in combination with the timing of the rollout of Oportunidades and the panel dimension of the survey. Height for age among children exposed during the first four years of life is contrasted with similar children who were not exposed. Consistent with previous evidence, this analysis finds positive and sizable effects on children who lived in rural poor communities incorporated at the beginning of the intervention. In contrast, the impacts of the program in rural localities incorporated later and in suburban and urban communities are, at best, very modest.

Nutrition.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys around the world haven not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from clear, and the direction of the impact cannot be established a priori, since consumption of food away from home affects both food consumption and the poverty line. This paper exploits rich data on food away from home collected as part of the National Household Survey in Peru, shedding light to the extent to which welfare measures differ depending on whether they properly account for food away from home. Peru is a relevant context, with the average Peruvian household spending 28 percent of their food budget on food away from home by 2010. The analysis indicates that failure to account for the consumption of food away from home has important implications for poverty and inequality measures as well as the understanding of who the poor are. First, accounting for food away from home results in extreme poverty rates that are 18 percent higher and moderate poverty rates that are 16 percent lower. These results are also consistent, in fact more pronounced, with poverty gap and severity measures. Second, consumption inequality measured by the Gini coefficient decreases by 1.3 points when food away from home is included, a significant reduction. Finally, inclusion of food away from home results in a reclassification of households from poor to non-poor status and vice versa: 20 percent of the poor are different when the analysis includes consumption of food away from home. This effect is large enough that a standard poverty profile analysis results in significant differences between the poverty classification based on whether food away from home is included or not. The differences cover many dimensions, including demographics, education, and labor market characteristics. Taken together, the results indicate that a serious rethinking of how to deal with the consumption of food away from home in measuring well-being is urgently needed to properly estimate and understand poverty around the world.

Data Collection --- Food & Beverage Industry --- Food Consumption --- Industry --- Inequality --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poverty --- Poverty Lines --- Poverty Reduction --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Welfare Measurement

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Rising obesity rates are one of the most challenging public health issues in many emerging economies. The extent to which the nutritional composition of food consumed away from home is behind this rise, and the links with socioeconomic status, is not yet well understood. This paper explores this question by combining a representative restaurant survey that includes detailed information on the nutritional composition of the most widely consumed meals in Metropolitan Lima and a representative household survey with anthropometric measures of adult women. The findings indicate that the nutritional quality in restaurants located in the food environment of the households is significantly associated with higher rates of obesity and overweight. Up to 15 percent of the socioeconomic gradient in obesity is attributable to restaurant food quality, with sodium being the main driver. This highlights the importance of considering the food environment to inform public health policies, particularly for the poor.

Diet --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Nutrition --- Obesity