Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty & the Ways to End it

by Abhijit V. Banerjee

Therefore, if South Asians are small, it is probably because they, and their parents, did not get as much nourishment as their counterparts in other countries. And indeed, everything suggests that children are very badly nourished in India. The usual measure of how well a child has been fed through the childhood years is height, compared to the international average height for that age. By this measure, the numbers for India from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS 3) are devastating. Roughly half the children under five are stunted, which means that they are far below the norm. One-fourth of them are severely stunted, representing extreme nutritional deprivation. The children are also extraordinarily underweight given their height: About one in five children under three is wasted, which means they fall below the international definition of severe malnourishment. What makes these facts more striking is that the stunting and wasting rates in sub-Saharan Africa, undoubtedly the poorest area of the world, are only about half those in India.