Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting
By: Lykke E. Andersen
Creating equality of opportunity is one of the most important roles of the government in any country. It is about leveling the playing field, so that children born into disadvantaged families (through no fault of their own, obviously) will not automatically become disadvantaged themselves and will not automatically transmit these disadvantages to their own children. It is about breaking the vicious cycle and intergenerational transmission of poverty.
To accomplish this important job, the government has to step in at several points in a child’s life — even before it is born. First, it has to make sure that its mother is well-nourished and un-stressed during pregnancy, so that the fetus can develop appropriately and be born healthy. Second, it has to make sure that the mother has time and energy to breastfeed the child for at least 6 months. It also has to make sure that healthy, nutritious food is accessible for every family, and that every child grows up in healthy, sanitary conditions, so that infections and diarrhea don’t zap the nutritional value of the food it gets.
The next important intervention is to make sure that all kids are well prepared for school, so that they enter primary school on equal terms. And finally, the government has to supply each child with a useful education that matches and enhances the skills and talents of each individual child, so that they can become productive and successful as adults.
This, of course, is a huge, expensive challenge, and not many governments manage to achieve equality of opportunity. But in order to make progress, it is important to understand how well each government is doing at the different stages. In this blog, we will focus on how well Bolivia has been doing at promoting equality of opportunity in the first five years of the life of a child.
For that purpose we use the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) that have been conducted regularly in most developing countries in the world since the late 1980s. These surveys measure, among many other things, the height, weight, and age of young children (0 to 5 years old), and we use this information to create an indicator of malnutrition. If a child is more than two standard deviations below the normal for their age in either height or weight, we will consider them malnourished. In the case of Bolivia, almost all malnourishment is due to stunting (children to short for their age) rather than wasting (children too thin for their height). This indicator has shown some progress in Bolivia, but only after 2003 (see the black line in Figure 1).
We introduce some nuances into this variable, by considering slight malnutrition (between 1 and 2 standard deviations below normal), moderate malnutrition (between 2 and 3 standard deviations below normal), and severe malnutrition (three or more standard deviations below normal), and then run regressions to see how important family background variables are in explaining the variations in the nutritional status of young children. If family background is important, the government is not doing a good job of leveling the playing field.
To measure family background we use the following three variables: Wealth, Education, and Genetics. Wealth is measured by the availability of productive assets in the household (e.g. electricity, refrigerator, Internet, etc.); Education is the number of years of education of the mother; and Genetics is the height of the mother.
Figure 1: Nutrition and the importance of family background in Bolivia, 1993-2008
Source: Author’s elaboration based on Demographic and Health Surveys.
In Figure 1 we see that Wealth, Education and Genetics have become more important in explaining the variation in young children’s nutritional status, suggesting that the government has become less good at leveling the playing field for very young children. The deterioration was particularly strong during the period 1993-2003, where the importance of the three family background variables increased from 9.6% to 15.0%. The increase is statistically highly significant. During the same period, overall malnourishment remained constant at about 26%. Thus, a very dismal period in terms of early childhood development and equality of opportunity.
Between 2003 and 2008, there was an important reduction in the level of malnutrition, with the overall share of malnourished children dropping from 26% to 20%. The importance of family background remained high in 2008, though, explaining 15.6% of total variation in nutritional status.
Unfortunately there are no subsequent Demographic and Health Surveys available for Bolivia, so we don’t know if the situation has improved since 2008. Hopefully it has, because disadvantages in early childhood tend to carry over to the educational period and later to the work phase of life, thus severely hampering policies to promote social mobility. We urgently need a new round of DHS to know how well the Bono Juana Azurduy and related early childhood policies in Bolivia are working.
