Spears Dean
Department of Economics and Population Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Economics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, India.
J Dev Econ. 2020 Sep;146:102277. doi: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.08.003.
Physical height is an important measure of human capital. However, differences in average height across developing countries are poorly explained by economic differences. Children in India are shorter than poorer children in Africa, a widely studied puzzle called "the Asian enigma." This paper proposes and quantitatively investigates the hypothesis that differences in sanitation - and especially in the population density of open defecation - can statistically account for an important component of the Asian enigma, India's gap relative to sub-Saharan Africa. The paper's main result computes a demographic projection of the increase in the average height of Indian children, if they were counterfactually exposed to sub-Saharan African sanitation, using a non-parametric reweighting method. India's projected increase in mean height is at least as large as the gap. The analysis also critically reviews evidence from recent estimates in the literature. Two possible mechanisms are effects on children and on their mothers.
身高是衡量人力资本的一项重要指标。然而，经济差异并不能很好地解释发展中国家之间平均身高的差异。印度儿童比非洲更贫困地区的儿童个子更矮，这是一个被广泛研究的谜题，即“亚洲之谜”。本文提出并定量研究了这样一个假设：卫生条件的差异——尤其是露天排便的人口密度差异——在统计学上能够解释“亚洲之谜”的一个重要组成部分，即印度与撒哈拉以南非洲地区相比存在的差距。本文的主要结果是，运用非参数重加权方法，对印度儿童平均身高的增长进行了人口统计学预测，前提是假设他们接触到撒哈拉以南非洲地区的卫生条件。预计印度平均身高的增长幅度至少与这一差距一样大。该分析还严格审视了文献中近期估计的证据。两种可能的机制是对儿童及其母亲的影响。
