Zanello, G., Srinivasan, C.S. and Shankar, B. orcid.org/0000-0001-8102-321X (2016) What explains Cambodia’s success in reducing child stunting-2000-2014? PLoS ONE, 11 (9). e0162668. ISSN 1932-6203
Abstract
In many developing countries, high levels of child undernutrition persist alongside rapid economic growth. There is considerable interest in the study of countries that have made rapid progress in child nutrition to uncover the driving forces behind these improvements. Cambodia is often cited as a success case having reduced the incidence of child stunting from 51% to 34% over the period 2000 to 2014. To what extent is this success driven by improvements in the underlying determinants of nutrition, such as wealth and education, (“covariate effects”) and to what extent by changes in the strengths of association between these determinants and nutrition outcomes (“coefficient effects”)? Using determinants derived from the widely-applied UNICEF framework for the analysis of child nutrition and data from four Demographic and Health Surveys datasets, we apply quantile regression based decomposition methods to quantify the covariate and coefficient effect contributions to this improvement in child nutrition. The method used in the study allows the covariate and coefficient effects to vary across the entire distribution of child nutrition outcomes. There are important differences in the drivers of improvements in child nutrition between severely stunted and moderately stunted children and between rural and urban areas. The translation of improvements in household endowments, characteristics and practices into improvements in child nutrition (the coefficient effects) may be influenced by macroeconomic shocks or other events such as natural calamities or civil disturbance and may vary substantially over different time periods. Our analysis also highlights the need to explicitly examine the contribution of targeted child health and nutrition interventions to improvements in child nutrition in developing countries.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 Zanello et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Keywords: | Analysis of Variance; Cambodia; Child; Child Nutrition Disorders; Child Nutritional Physiological Phenomena; Child, Preschool; Comorbidity; Economic Development; Female; Growth Disorders; Health Surveys; Humans; Incidence; Infant; Male; Nutritional Status; Rural Health; Socioeconomic Factors; Urban Health |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 May 2020 10:25 |
Last Modified: | 14 May 2020 10:25 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Public Library of Science (PLoS) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0162668 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:160512 |