Nutrition, health, birth order and seasonality: intrahousehold allocation among children in rural India

Abstract

"Nutrients available to children are determined largely by intrahousehold allocations. There are a number of reasons why birth order may affect these allocations. A model is developed to estimate critical parameters of parental preferences regarding the allocation of nutrients among their children. Latent variable estimates for rural south India indicate that parental preferences have productivity-equity tradeoffs and parents favor older children. The productivity-equity tradeoff, however, is much less for the lean season. Therefore, when food is scarcest, parents follow more closely a pure investment strategy, exposing their more vulnerable children to greater malnutrition risk."