Relative Deprivation and Malnutrition in Ecuador
Keywords:
relative deprivation, malnutrition, EcuadorAbstract
We hypothesise that relative deprivation has a deleterious effect on children’s malnutrition, one of the most prevalent health problems in the word, and that the main pathway of this relationship is the larger psychosocial stress of parents with higher relative deprivation. We model parental mental health as a function of own consumption and others’ consumption levels by means of Fehr and Schmidt’s (1999) utility function and assume a positive association between stress and malnutrition. Our findings for Ecuador suggest that relative deprivation leads to children’s malnutrition. This effect is obtained after controlling for a rich set of individual and regional controls, which include, for the first time in a study of this sort, measures of parental height and weight. Heterogeneous effects indicate that breastfeeding can be highly effective in compensating the deleterious effects of relative deprivation. After controlling for relative deprivation, inequality shows no effect on malnutrition.
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