Agricultural Production Subsidies and Child Health: Evidence from Malawi
No hay miniatura disponible
Fecha
Autores
Título de la revista
ISSN de la revista
Título del volumen
Editor
Resumen
Descripción
Can rapid increases in agricultural productivity lead to improved nutritional outcomes for children in developing countries? In the 2005-06 growing season, the Malawi government introduced the Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP), a high-profile and large-scale agricultural inputs subsidy targeting small farmers. This paper links new data on sub-district subsidy allocation across Traditional Authorities -- an administrative level beneath districts and above the village in Malawi -- to more than 20,000 observations of anthropometric outcomes for children born in rural Malawi between 1995 and 2010. We use the considerable spatial variation in TA-level per household fertilizer voucher allocation and the differences across birth cohorts introduced by the timing of FISP to study the effect of the program on child anthropometrics. We find a small, positive effect of Malawi’s farm subsidy program on child anthropometric outcomes in Malawi's Central region -- the region with the the historically highest stunting and underweight rates. Our estimates suggest that the Malawi fertilizer subsidy has increased child height-for-age z-scores in the Central Region by approximately 0.04 standard deviations, a two percent increase, on average. We investigate mechanisms of the effect and discuss its potential significance.