University of York, Department of Economics and Related Studies, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom.
Econ Hum Biol. 2019 Dec;35:144-161. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2019.06.003. Epub 2019 Jul 8.
This study explores the inequality of opportunity in child malnutrition in ten developing countries in Asia, where a high proportion of children still remain vulnerable to food insecurity. This study takes account of multidimensional aspects of household and parental socio-economic status, and partitions children into distinct types through a data-driven clustering method. This is followed by a comparison of the malnutrition rates between types. Next, we decompose the observed disparity into the factors that are associated with the between-type disparity in malnutrition rates through a non-linear decomposition method. The results indicate that in all 10 countries, significant between-type disparities are found. We find the largest difference in Pakistan as 21.7 percentage points and the smallest difference in Maldives as 5.9 percentage points. In five of the ten countries, the difference in household affluence explains the largest part of the observed between-type disparity. All the results suggest that priority should be given to protecting children from marginalised households in order to mitigate the inequality in child health.
本研究探讨了亚洲十个发展中国家儿童营养不良机会不平等的问题，这些国家仍有很大比例的儿童面临粮食不安全的威胁。本研究考虑了家庭和父母社会经济地位的多维方面，并通过数据驱动的聚类方法将儿童分为不同类型。然后，我们比较了不同类型之间的营养不良率。接下来，我们通过非线性分解方法，将观察到的差异分解为与营养不良率的类型间差异相关的因素。结果表明，在所有 10 个国家中，都存在显著的类型间差异。我们发现巴基斯坦的差异最大，为 21.7 个百分点，马尔代夫的差异最小，为 5.9 个百分点。在这十个国家中的五个国家中，家庭富裕程度的差异解释了观察到的类型间差异的最大部分。所有结果都表明，应优先保护来自边缘化家庭的儿童，以减轻儿童健康方面的不平等。
