Nutrition Improvement and Economic Growth

A direct comparison of economic and nutritional outcomes can be done and is likely to be illuminating in that it suggests where to look for other major contributing causes of the nutritional changes observed. Thus, in Figure 3.1, the percentage change in per caput GDP is compared with percentage point change in preschool underweight prevalences with data from the last two decades. Those countries which grew most rapidly can be seen to have also made good progress in nutrition. India, Egypt, and Pakistan for example did somewhat worse than might be expected, while Zimbabwe and Malaysia did better. The relationship between economic growth and rate of change in nutritional outcomes was strong. The linear fit to the data is used here to calculate residuals; the quadratic fit is due substantially to the low right hand data points. Of the case studies, only for Thailand does the residual change significantly between the two models, so for this purpose the choice makes little difference.

We cannot however ascribe deviations from this directly to the type of economic policies adopted themselves, because we need later to look at the effects of human resource development policies (Chapter 4) and nutrition programmes (Chapter 5). The deviation might be explained by such factors as the degree of equity in the economic growth, its poverty-alleviating effect, the priority attached by the government to social support (reflected in its spending on health, education and welfare) and the effect of more direct nutrition-related programmes. Zimbabwe for example, achieved significant nutritional improvements during the 1980s despite economic decline. Clearly, nutritional improvement can move ahead of economic development, due to the type of factors mentioned above. Moreover, in Mexico and Brazil, the nutrition situation continued to improve during a period of economic stagnation (as it had done during the 1970s boom) but much more slowly. Nutrition does seem to be resilient in the face of economic decline.