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42 DEREK HEADEY


example, the estimates suggest that a doubling of GDP per capita would increase women’s secondary education by 14 percentage points and access to medical births by 18 percentage points. The effects on asset-based poverty are somewhat weak, although this may be because this measure pertains to extreme poverty. So, in general, economic growth does typically bring about significant changes in these four dimensions of socioeconomic development but with large variations across different growth episodes.


Successes and Failures While formal tests suggest that nutrition-sensitive development typically requires increased food production along with broader socioeconomic developments, it is important to verify these findings with actual country experiences. To do so the study identifies the most successful and least successful nutrition episodes in the dataset in terms of changes in both stunting and underweight prevalence, as the former was not always available. The criteria for success are twofold. First, a country (or Indian state) must show progress against at least one childhood malnutrition indicator faster than 1 percentage point per year. As it happens, this minimum speed of progress would almost always ensure success in meeting the MDG target of halving malnutrition in 25 years, unless initial malnutrition prevalence was well above 50 percent. Second, there must at least be some progress against the other childhood malnutrition indicator (in other words, a country or state cannot show progress on one front but regress on another). As for the definition of failure, it is defined as a 0.4 percent per year increase in at least one childhood malnutrition variable, and no progress on the other. For each of these case studies, trends in the determinants of nutrition-sensitive


development were also documented, including whether the episode was accompa- nied by rapid economic growth (including in agriculture), increased food avail- ability, and improvements in the four dimensions of NUSSDI. Finally, successes and failures were further categorized into various groups, such as “proven” and “unproven” successes. Proven successes mostly include longer episodes where there were also nutrition-specific programs in place, whereas unproven successes refer to recent episodes that have not yet stood the test of time. Do the success stories and failures confirm the more formal statistical findings?


The short answer is yes, although there are some important caveats. For example, among the “proven” success stories, relatively strong economic


growth—including growth in agricultural production—is prominent. The only significant exceptions to this conclusion are middle-income countries like Brazil and Mexico in the 1980s and Honduras in the late 1990s, where it appears that existing national income was high enough to fund effective social development programs.


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