Abstract

PIP: Mothers who work may not have enough time to adequately breast-feed or prepare nutritious foods for their young children, or use public services designed to improve child nutrition. The authors quantify the effects of maternal labor supply and mothers' market labor force participation upon child nutrition using survey data from Conakry, Guinea, and child height, standardized for age and sex, as the indicator of nutritional status. 17% of children under age 5 years in Conakry are chronically malnourished. The conceptual framework and empirical strategy are described, followed by an examination of the data and construction of the labor supply and income measures. Analysis of the data found that additional time devoted by the mother to market work is associated with reductions in height-for-age of children under age 5 years. However, increases in mothers' labor income lead to greater child height. Deleterious impacts of mother's time in market work, controlling for income, were found for both self-employment and wage employment, despite differences in conditions of work and the feasibility of combining child and market-oriented activities. Furthermore, additions to maternal labor income yield larger increases in child height than do equivalent additions to other non-mother household income. It follows that income is not completely pooled within households and preferences differ among family members over the allocation of resources to child health-related goods and services and other uses. Despite the large estimated benefits of maternal income, maternal work overall does not appear to improve child nutrition.