The Impact of Improving Nutrition During Early Childhood on Education among Guatemalan Adults

作者：John A. Maluccio, John Hoddinott, Jere R. Behrman, Reynaldo Martorell, Agnes Quisumbing, Aryeh D. Stein · 发表于：The Economic Journal · 年份：2009 · DOI：10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02220.x · 被引用次数：558 · 研究领域：Child Nutrition and Water Access、Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare、Income, Poverty, and Inequality

Using a longitudinal survey from rural Guatemala, we examine the effect of an early childhood nutritional intervention on adult educational outcomes. An intent-to-treat model yields substantial effects of an experimental intervention that provided highly nutritious food supplements to children, a quarter century after it ended: increases of 1.2 grades completed for women and one quarter SD on standardised reading comprehension and non-verbal cognitive ability tests for both women and men. Two-stage least squares results that endogenise the actual supplement intakes corroborate these magnitudes. Improving the nutrient intakes of very young children can have substantial, long-term, educational consequences. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2009.