Chittur Srinivasan

Rural-Urban Disparities in Child Nutrition in Bangladesh and Nepal

BackgroundThe 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.MethodsUsing 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.ResultsThere 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.ConclusionsPublic 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.

Can nutrition be promoted through agriculture-led food price policies? A systematic review

Objective To systematically review the available evidence on whether national or international agricultural policies that directly affect the price of food influence the prevalence rates of undernutrition or nutrition-related chronic disease in children and adults. Design Systematic review. Setting Global. Search strategy We systematically searched five databases for published literature (MEDLINE, EconLit, Agricola, AgEcon Search, Scopus) and systematically browsed other databases and relevant organisational websites for unpublished literature. Reference lists of included publications were hand-searched for additional relevant studies. We included studies that evaluated or simulated the effects of national or international food-price-related agricultural policies on nutrition outcomes reporting data collected after 1990 and published in English. Primary and secondary outcomes Prevalence rates of undernutrition (measured with anthropometry or clinical deficiencies) and overnutrition (obesity and nutrition-related chronic diseases including cancer, heart disease and diabetes). Results We identified a total of four relevant reports; two ex post evaluations and two ex ante simulations. A study from India reported on the undernutrition rates in children, and the other three studies from Egypt, the Netherlands and the USA reported on the nutrition-related chronic disease outcomes in adults. Two of the studies assessed the impact of policies that subsidised the price of agricultural outputs and two focused on public food distribution policies. The limited evidence base provided some support for the notion that agricultural policies that change the prices of foods at a national level can have an effect on population-level nutrition and health outcomes. Conclusions A systematic review of the available literature suggests that there is a paucity of robust direct evidence on the impact of agricultural price policies on nutrition and health.

Potential economic impacts of terminator technologies: policy implications for developing countries

The terminator gene can render seeds sterile, so forcing farmers to purchase fresh seed every year. It is a technological solution to the problem of market failure that could increase the appropriability of R&D investment more effectively than intellectual property rights legislation or patents. This paper shows that appropriability should be more than tripled and that this leads to greater private R&D investment, which may be expected to double or triple. This would bring open-pollinating varieties into line with F1 hybrids, for which seed cannot be saved. In turn, the increased investment should raise yield increases to levels similar to those for hybrid crops. Thus, there are benefits to set against the possible ecological and environmental costs and the clear distributional and social consequences. The paper discusses the way the seed market is developing, the possible impacts, especially from a developing country viewpoint, and considers the policy changes that are needed.

Transaction Costs, Information Technologies, and the Choice of Marketplace among Farmers in Northern Ghana

Abstract Using a transactions costs framework, we examine the impact of information and communication technologies (mobile phones and radios) use on market participation in developing country agricultural markets using a novel transaction-level data set of Ghanaian farmers. Our analysis of the choice of markets by farmers suggests that market information from a broader range of markets may not always induce farmers to sell in more distant markets; instead farmers may use broader market information to enhance their bargaining power in closer markets. Finally, we find weak evidence on the impact of using mobile phones in attracting farm gate buyers.

Winter wheat in England and Wales, 1923–1995: what do indices of genetic diversity reveal?

Genealogical data have been used very widely to construct indices with which to examine the contribution of plant breeding programmes to the maintenance and enhancement of genetic resources. In this paper we use such indices to examine changes in the genetic diversity of the winter wheat crop in England and Wales between 1923 and 1995. We find that, except for one period characterized by the dominance of imported varieties, the genetic diversity of the winter wheat crop has been remarkably stable. This agrees with many studies of plant breeding programmes elsewhere. However, underlying the stability of the winter wheat crop is accelerating varietal turnover without any significant diversification of the genetic resources used. Moreover, the changes we observe are more directly attributable to changes in the varietal shares of the area under winter wheat than to the genealogical relationship between the varieties sown. We argue, therefore, that while genealogical indices reflect how well plant breeders have retained and exploited the resources with which they started, these indices suffer from a critical limitation. They do not reflect the proportion of the available range of genetic resources which has been effectively utilized in the breeding programme: complex crosses of a given set of varieties can yield high indices, and yet disguise the loss (or non-utilization) of a large proportion of the available genetic diversity.

Can adherence to dietary guidelines address excess caloric intake? An empirical assessment for the UK

The facilitation of healthier dietary choices by consumers is a key element of government strategies to combat the rising incidence of obesity in developed and developing countries. Public health campaigns to promote healthier eating often target compliance with recommended dietary guidelines for consumption of individual nutrients such as fats and added sugars. This paper examines the association between improved compliance with dietary guidelines for individual nutrients and excess calorie intake, the most proximate determinant of obesity risk. We apply quantile regressions and counterfactual decompositions to cross-sectional data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (2000-01) to assess how excess calorie consumption patterns in the UK are likely to change with improved compliance with dietary guidelines. We find that the effects of compliance vary significantly across different quantiles of calorie consumption. Our results show that compliance with dietary guidelines for individual nutrients, even if successfully achieved, is likely to be associated with only modest shifts in excess calorie consumption patterns. Consequently, public health campaigns that target compliance with dietary guidelines for specific nutrients in isolation are unlikely to have a significant effect on the obesity risk faced by the population.

What Explains Cambodia’s Success in Reducing Child Stunting-2000-2014?

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.

Modelling Economic Returns to Plant Variety Protection in the UK

This paper attempts an empirical assessment of the incentive effects of plant variety protection regimes in the generation of crop variety innovations. A duration model of plant variety protection certificates is used to infer the private appropriability of returns from agricultural crop variety innovations in the UK over the period 1965-2000. The results suggest that plant variety protection provides only modest appropriability of returns to innovators of agricultural crop varieties. The value distribution of plant variety protection certificates is highly skewed with a large proportion of innovations providing virtually no returns to innovators. Increasing competition from newer varieties appears to have accelerated the turnover of varieties reducing appropriability further. Plant variety protection emerges as a relatively weak instrument of protection.

Biotechnology, IPRs and Agriculture

Agriculture and Intellectual Property Rights: Economic, Institutional and Implementation Issues in Biotechnology edited by V. Santaniello, R.E. Evenson, D. Zilberman and G.A. Carlson, 2000, CABI Publishing UK£45/US

An assessment of the potential consumption impacts of WHO dietary norms in OECD countries

80 Hbk. (ix + 259 pages) ISBN 0 85199 457 1This book is the outcome of a conference entitled ‘The shape of the coming agricultural biotechnology transformation: strategy, investment and policy approaches from an economic perspective’, which was organized by the International Consortium on Agricultural Biotechnology Research (ICABR) and held in Rome in June, 1999. Biotechnology is an area where the economists ingenuity in modelling impacts is struggling to keep pace with the sheer rapidity of scientific advance. This conference, which has now become an annual feature, attempts to create a framework for the economic analysis of the impacts of biotechnology that would be relevant for economists as well as policymakers.The book explores how the development of biotechnology and the expansion and strengthening of intellectual property rights (IPRs) that apply to processes and products (new cultivars) could fundamentally change the nature of agriculture and agricultural research. Part I of the book examines the legal systems and implementation mechanisms currently in place for IPRs in agriculture and the differences between the USA and European Union perspectives. It also addresses the complex implications of the Convention on Biological Diversity for conventional IPR systems. Part II lays out the economic approach to IPRs for agricultural technology. Part III of the book uses readily available data on patented inventions to draw conclusions about the state of biotechnology inventions. Finally, Part IV covers two detailed case studies of agricultural biotechnology products that have been influenced by IPRs – transgenic crops in the USA and canola in Canada.The book views IPRs in agriculture as a relatively young, evolutionary process with the direction of development often decided by judicial decisions in response to new developments. Several deeply troubling questions about what can be legitimately protected still remain unresolved. This calls into question the ‘one size fits all’ World Trade Organization (WTO)-Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) approach, which seeks to have a uniform IPR regime in all countries, irrespective of the stage of development. Whether economic theory provides much support for uniform IPR regimes is an issue that needs to be explored further.For policy makers in developing countries struggling in a domestic environment hostile to IPRs, useful guidance is available (Chapter 4). A move towards explicit consideration of costs and benefits, including who gains and who loses, may raise the level of the debate and facilitate the design of genuinely effective sui-generis IPRs. Many emerging technologies, such as terminator technology, might no longer look so threatening when subjected to rigorous economic scrutiny. The evaluation of the market values of farmers’ rights can help in the assessment if there are in fact large monopoly rents to be had by extending the boundaries of conventional IPR systems to encompass natural genetic resources. However, in our opinion, the distributional consequences of biotechnology within the agriculture sector did not receive sufficient attention in the book.A critical issue that is highlighted is that it will soon be impossible to ignore IPR issues – even national and international research systems that are committed to keeping their research output in the public domain will need strategies to respond to IPR issues. This is illustrated by the experience of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) institutions that find themselves drawn into a tangled web of IPR-related issues as they attempt to take their work into the frontier areas of biotechnology.Empirical studies on the impact of biotechnology have been rather sparse, possibly owing to the lack of data. The studies on canola in Canada and transgenic crops in the USA provided useful insights into how IPRs affect the allocation of responsibilities between the public and private sectors. They also highlighted the externalities associated with biotechnologies and the complex regulatory challenges that they pose. But there is clearly a need for much more empirical work. The theory tells us that IPRs promote innovation, but the kind of markets that are going to emerge for biotech inventions and the associated transaction costs are matters of concern. Whether the multiplicity of patents and the dependence of new innovations on numerous preceding ones will create a patent gridlock, eventually slowing down technical progress, is an important empirical question to be addressed. Similarly, if the rapid consolidation in the life science industry is, in part, a response to problems of IPR management, it will be necessary to consider whether the market power that goes with high levels of concentration could eventually turn out to be dysfunctional for innovation.This book provides a range of empirical evidence on impacts and useful pointers for further empirical work. The key message of the book could well be that many of the vexing issues surrounding IPRs and biotechnology may after all be susceptible to systematic economic analysis.