The present paper investigates the nutrition demand pattern for rural households in India. The non-parametric approach of quantile regression is applied to characterize the entire distribution of calorie consumption. This technique has an advantage over the traditional ordinary least square technique. It relaxes the assumption of a constant effect of the explanatory variables over the entire distribution of the dependent variable. These effects are allowed to vary over the entire distribution of dependent variable i.e., in this case the distribution of calorie consumption. The results show that indeed, the responsiveness of calorie consumption to various factors differs across different levels of calorie consumption. A comparison of the quantile regression results with OLS results suggests conclusions and policy suggestions based on OLS results are unlikely to be ideal. Some further light is also shed on the debate on calorie income elasticity as the magnitude is observed to be different for the undernourished and the over nourished households.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre in its series ASARC Working Papers with number
2005-02.
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.: