Height, Health, and Inequality: The Distribution of Adult Heights in India

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between adult heights and the distribution of income across populations of individuals. There is a long literature that examines the relationship between mean adult heights and living standards. If adult height is set by the balance between food intake and charges to disease in early childhood, it is informative about economic and epidemiological conditions in childhood. Because taller populations are better-off, more productive, and live longer, the relationship between childhood conditions and adult height has become an important focus in the study of the relationship between health and wealth. Here I follow one of the tributaries of this main stream. A relationship between income and height at the individual level has implications for the effects of income inequality on the distribution of heights. These relationships parallel, but are somewhat more concrete than, the various relationships between income inequality and health that have been debated in the economic and epidemiological literatures, Richard G. Wilkinson (1996), Angus Deaton (2003). If height is an increasing but concave function of income, average height will be negatively related to income inequality, Richard Steckel (1995). Income inequality will also have implications for the dispersion of height, so that inequality in height might serve as an indicator of inequality of income in the absence of data on the latter, just as mean height might serve as an indicator of mean income, Aravinda M. Guntupalli and Joerg Baten (2006) and Alexander Moradi and Baten (2005). Differences in height between subpopulations, such as lords and vassals, or highlanders and lowlanders, may also provide information on the distribution of resources between such subpopulations,Carles Boix and Frances Rosenbluth (2006). In Section 2 below, I present a theoretical discussion of what to expect. In Section 3, I provide an analysis of adult heights in India, where I can look at the relationship across states between (a) mean heights and expenditure inequality, (b) inequality in height and expenditure inequality, (c) men’s and women’s heights. The difference in heights between men and women is of considerable importance in its own right. India has one of the highest rates of child malnutrition in the world with around 55 percent of young children stunted. A leading explanation for this is health discrimination against women, Vulimiri Ramalingaswami,Urban Jonsson and Jon Rohde (1996). If discrimination starts in early childhood, and since all evidence suggests that there are regional differences in the treatment of women, there should be clear traces in spatial patterns of relative heights between men and women.