Long Term Consequences of Early Childhood Malnutrition

John Hoddinott, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Harold Alderman, World Bank Group
Bill Kinsey, University of Zimbabwe

This paper examines the impact of preschool malnutrition on subsequent human capital formation in rural Zimbabwe using an instrumental variables – maternal fixed effects (IV-MFE) estimator with a long term panel data set. Representations of civil war and drought “shocks” are used to identify differences in preschool nutritional status across siblings. Improvements in height-for-age in preschoolers are associated with increased height as a young adult, a greater number of grades of schooling completed and an earlier age at which the child starts school. Had the median pre-school child in this sample had the stature of a median child in a developed country, by adolescence, she would be 4.6 centimeters taller, had completed an additional 0.7 grades of schooling and would have started school seven months earlier.