Height, health, and development

Abstract

Adult height is determined by genetic potential and by net nutrition, the balance between food intake and the demands on it, including the demands of disease, most importantly during early childhood. Historians have made effective use of recorded heights to indicate living standards, in both health and income, for periods where there are few other data. Understanding the determinants of height is also important for understanding health; taller people earn more on average, do better on cognitive tests, and live longer. This paper investigates the environmental determinants of height across 43 developing countries. Unlike in rich countries, where adult height is well predicted by mortality in infancy, there is no consistent relationship across and within countries between adult height on the one hand and childhood mortality or living conditions on the other. In particular, adult African women are taller than is warranted by their low incomes and high childhood mortality, not to mention their mothers' educational level and reported nutrition. High childhood mortality in Africa is associated with taller adults, which suggests that mortality selection dominates scarring, the opposite of what is found in the rest of the world. The relationship between population heights and income is inconsistent and unreliable, as is the relationship between income and health more generally.

Fig. 1.

Women's height by date of birth. Simple unweighted averages of country data within regions. The dollar figures are real (1996 international prices) GDP per capita in 1970 (chained) from the Penn World Table, Version 6.1.

Fig. 2.

Women's height and real per-capita income.

Fig. 3.

Average height and child mortality.

Fig. 4.

Average height and real per-capita income in year of birth.