Economic inequality and child stunting in Bangladesh and Kenya: an investigation of six hypotheses

Consistent with the increasing focus on issues of equity in developing countries, I extend the literature analyzing the relationship between economic inequality and individual health to the developing world. Using survey data from Bangladesh and Kenya with economic status measured by a wealth index and with three different geographic definitions of community, I analyze six competing hypotheses for how economic inequality may be related to stunting among children younger than 5 years old. I find little support for the predominant hypothesis that economic inequality as measured by a Gini index is an important predictor of individual health. Instead, I find that the difference between a household's wealth and the mean household wealth in the community is the measure of economic inequality that is most closely related to stunting in these countries. In particular, a 1 standard deviation increase in household wealth relative to the community mean is associated with a 30–32 percent decrease in the odds of stunting in Bangladesh and a 16–21 percent decrease in the odds of stunting in Kenya.     

Exploring long-term economic well-being and child outcomes with the Supplemental Poverty Measure: evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

This study is the first to use the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to reexamine the relationships between long-term economic well-being and child outcomes. We decompose the differences between the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and the SPM and examine such relationships with 15 cognitive, physical, and social–emotional outcomes for 754 ten- to nineteen-year-olds as reported in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) 2007 Child Development Supplement. Using PSID data from 1998 to 2006, we measure long-term economic well-being using the average natural logarithm of the ratio of family resources to the poverty threshold with a series of models, beginning with the OPM and converting it step-by-step into the SPM. We find that some steps in constructing the SPM, especially including in-kind benefits and using the SPM thresholds, weaken the relationships between our economic well-being measure and the cognitive outcomes, although including in-kind benefits strengthens the relationships with many of the physical and social–emotional outcomes. Better understanding the relationships between different poverty measures and outcomes of interest can open new avenues for research on mitigating the adverse effects of poverty and could perhaps allow us to better target interventions to individuals who are at greatest risk for adverse outcomes.     

How Means-Tested Transfer Programs Respond to Household Earned-Income Increases: Policy and Practice

We use data from the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation to estimate how four means-tested transfer programs respond to household earned-income increases. In general, the programs respond as we would expect based on the program laws and regulations, with some important exceptions, including that benefits received under some programs take much longer to fully adjust to earned-income increases than we would expect. We explore the reasons for these departures from our expectations and discuss the implications for policymakers’ efforts to balance the programs’ goals of poverty alleviation, cost effectiveness, and work promotion.