Srinivasan, C.S., Zanello, G. and Shankar, B. orcid.org/0000-0001-8102-321X (2013) Rural-urban disparities in child nutrition in Bangladesh and Nepal. BMC Public Health, 13. 581. ISSN 1471-2458
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The persistence of rural-urban disparities in child nutrition outcomes in developing countries alongside rapid urbanisation and increasing incidence of child malnutrition in urban areas raises an important health policy question - whether fundamentally different nutrition policies and interventions are required in rural and urban areas. Addressing this question requires an enhanced understanding of the main drivers of rural-urban disparities in child nutrition outcomes especially for the vulnerable segments of the population. This study applies recently developed statistical methods to quantify the contribution of different socio-economic determinants to rural-urban differences in child nutrition outcomes in two South Asian countries - Bangladesh and Nepal.
METHODS: Using DHS data sets for Bangladesh and Nepal, we apply quantile regression-based counterfactual decomposition methods to quantify the contribution of (1) the differences in levels of socio-economic determinants (covariate effects) and (2) the differences in the strength of association between socio-economic determinants and child nutrition outcomes (co-efficient effects) to the observed rural-urban disparities in child HAZ scores. The methodology employed in the study allows the covariate and coefficient effects to vary across entire distribution of child nutrition outcomes. This is particularly useful in providing specific insights into factors influencing rural-urban disparities at the lower tails of child HAZ score distributions. It also helps assess the importance of individual determinants and how they vary across the distribution of HAZ scores.
RESULTS: There are no fundamental differences in the characteristics that determine child nutrition outcomes in urban and rural areas. Differences in the levels of a limited number of socio-economic characteristics - maternal education, spouse's education and the wealth index (incorporating household asset ownership and access to drinking water and sanitation) contribute a major share of rural-urban disparities in the lowest quantiles of child nutrition outcomes. Differences in the strength of association between socio-economic characteristics and child nutrition outcomes account for less than a quarter of rural-urban disparities at the lower end of the HAZ score distribution.
CONCLUSIONS: Public health interventions aimed at overcoming rural-urban disparities in child nutrition outcomes need to focus principally on bridging gaps in socio-economic endowments of rural and urban households and improving the quality of rural infrastructure. Improving child nutrition outcomes in developing countries does not call for fundamentally different approaches to public health interventions in rural and urban areas.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2013 Srinivasan et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Bangladesh; Child Nutrition Disorders; Child Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; Child, Preschool; Databases, Factual; Female; Health Status Disparities; Humans; Infant; Infant Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; Male; Nepal; Rural Health; Socioeconomic Factors; Urban Health; Urbanization |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 11 May 2020 11:02 |
Last Modified: | 11 May 2020 11:10 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | BMC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/1471-2458-13-581 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:160520 |
Download
Filename: Rural-urban disparities in child nutrition in Bangladesh and Nepal.pdf
Licence: CC-BY 2.0