Who benefits from the South African Child Support Grant?: The role of gender and birthweight

Abstract

ABSTRACT Several studies have suggested that the South African Child Support Grant (CSG) reduces stunting in benefiting children. However, all of these studies have estimated the impact of the CSG on the mean of the height-for-age distribution. This paper investigates how this benefit varies across the quantiles of the height-for-age distribution. The result suggests that the positive effect at the mean is driven by children in the high quantiles and this group of children are more likely to be girls and children that did not experience low birthweight at birth. I argue that the CSG has not been able to address the malnutrition inequality that disadvantage male children and children born with low birthweight.