Malnutrition Gap as a New Measure of Child Malnutrition : A Global Application

Feng, Juan ; Alam, Shamma ; Eozenou, Patrick Hoang-Vu

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: NUTRITION;    MALNUTRITION;    CHILD HEALTH;    CHILD NUTRITION;    STUNTING;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8664
RP-ID  :  WPS8664

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

"Leaving no onebehind" is an overarching principle of theSustainable Development Goals. Many countries areprioritizing resources for those who are furthest behind.Existing malnutrition indicators—underweight, stunting,wasting, overweight, and severe wasting—are headcountratios. They do not capture how far behind malnourishedchildren are relative to the World Health Organizationgrowth standards. To understand the severity ofmalnutrition, this study develops a new malnutritionmeasurement, using the method originally developed forestimating poverty. This study estimates the prevalence,gap, and gap squared for stunting, wasting, overweight, andunderweight, using data from 94 developing countries over 20years. The results show that although in most cases theheadcount measures and gap measures are moving in the samedirection, in many other cases, they are moving in oppositedirections. Moreover, employing the new measures, the studycan identify countries that have low levels of headcount fora malnutrition measure but comparatively high severity ofmalnutrition according to the gap measures, and vice versa.This suggests that these new malnutrition measures provideadditional information on the severity of malnutrition thatis not possible to be known from headcount measures. Thesenew measures of the severity of malnutrition can thereforeimprove the monitoring of child malnutrition acrosscountries, and consequently help countries to achieve theirSustainable Development Goals.