Elsevier

Economics & Human Biology

Volume 30, September 2018, Pages 150-161
Economics & Human Biology

Household dairy production and child growth: Evidence from Bangladesh

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2018.07.001Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Milk production/consumption strongly linked to child growth in European and African populations.

  • This is the first study to look at dairy production and child growth in an Asian setting.

  • Uses unique survey data to exploit quasi-experimental variation in exposure to milk production.

  • Milk production increases child HAZ scores by 0.52 standard deviations in the 6–23 month age range.

  • However, milk production is associated with a 20-point decline in exclusive breastfeeding.

Abstract

Research from richer countries finds that dairy consumption has strong positive associations with linear growth in children, but surprisingly little evidence exists for developing countries where diets are far less diversified. One exception is a recent economics literature using the notion of incomplete markets to estimate the impacts of cattle ownership on children’s milk consumption and growth outcomes in Eastern Africa. In addition to external validity concerns, an obvious internal validity concern is that dairy producers may systematically differ from non-dairy households, particularly in terms of latent wealth or nutritional knowledge. We re-examine these concerns by applying a novel double difference model to data from rural Bangladesh, a country with relatively low levels of milk consumption and high rates of stunting. We exploit the fact that a cow’s lactation cycles provide an exogenous source of variation in household milk supply, which allows us to distinguish between a control group of households that do not own cows, a treatment group that own cows that have produced milk, and a placebo group of cow-owning households that have not produced milk in the past 12 months. We find that household dairy production increases height-for-age Z scores by 0.52 standard deviations in the critical 6–23 month growth window, though in the first year of life we find that household dairy supply is associated with a 21.7 point decline in the rate of breastfeeding. The results therefore suggest that increasing access to dairy products can be extremely beneficial to children’s nutrition, but may need to be accompanied by efforts to improve nutritional knowledge and appropriate breastfeeding practices.

JEL classifications

O130
Q120
I150

Keywords

Livestock
Dairy production
Animal-sourced foods
Stunting

Cited by (0)