This paper examines effects of socio-economic conditions on the standardised heights and body mass index of children in Interwar Britain. It uses the Boyd Orr cohort, a survey of predominantly poor families taken in 1937-9, which provides a unique opportunity to explore the determinants of child health in the era before the welfare state. We examine the trade-off between the quality (in the form of health outcomes) and the number of children in the family at a time when genuine poverty still existed in Britain. Our results provide strong support both for negative birth order effects and negative family size effects on the heights of children. No such effects are found for the body mass index (BMI). We find that household income per capita positively influences the heights of children but, even after accounting for this, the number of children in the family still has a negative effect on height. This latter effect is closely associated with overcrowding and particularly with the degree of cleanliness or hygiene in the household, which conditions exposure to factors predisposing to disease. We also analyse evidence collected retrospectively, which indicates that the effects of childhood conditions on height persisted into adulthood.
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Paper provided by Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University in its series Discussion Papers with number
572.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Carlos Bozzoli & Angus Deaton & Climent Quintana-Domeque, 2007.
"Child mortality, income and adult height,"
Working Papers
230, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing..
[Downloadable!]
Carlos Bozzoli & Angus Deaton & Climent Quintana-Domeque, 2007.
"Child mortality, income and adult height,"
Working Papers
162, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Research Program in Development Studies..
[Downloadable!]