Household wealth and gender gap widening in height: Evidence from adolescents in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between household wealth and child height utilizing longitudinal data on 7150 children from Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam. The concept of conditional wealth is applied to separate the influence of wealth in early childhood. Conditional wealth is the change in wealth that was unpredicted at the age of 5 years. This study finds two dimensions of heterogeneity in the wealth-gradient of adolescent height: gender and stunting status at the age of 5 years. For all four countries in the study, the effect of conditional wealth on adolescent height is stronger for boys than for girls. The estimates for the pooled sample indicate that after the age of 5 years, the growth of children who were stunted at that age is significantly more responsive to conditional wealth than the growth of non-stunted children. The analysis results show that for boys in Ethiopia, a one-standard-deviation increase in preadolescence wealth is associated with an increase of 1 cm (standard error [SE]: 0.3) in height at the age of 15 years. For boys in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, Peru, and Vietnam, the corresponding figures are 1.1 cm (SE: 0.4), 1.8 cm (SE: 0.4), and 1.2 cm (SE: 0.4), respectively. The effect of preadolescence wealth on adolescent height is not statistically significant for girls, except in some regions. Overall, the results suggest that household wealth in preadolescence disproportionately benefits the male population in these countries when using height as a proxy for health.