Growing up in a growing economy. Reassessing changes in biological living standards in Portugal during the twentieth century

This paper explores the assumptions about sample representativeness and provides a re-analysis of the data utilized by Cermeño and co-workers (2023a) to examine changes in the biological standards of living in Portugal over the 20th century, from records of child height taken from the Hospital de São Roque (1945–2000) in Lisbon, Portugal. The authors suggest that the largest decline in the prevalence of stunting – and concomitantly, the greatest increase in biological standards of living or population well-being - occurred during the Estado Novo dictatorship, before the democratic transition of 1974. Our analysis relies on the original raw data and results, as well re-calculated prevalences of stunting, examination of heigh-for-age distributions, and it also relied on other growth studies for comparison and various historic documents and published sources to assess the representatives of the sample. The Hospital de São Roque data may not fully represent the population of Lisbon, or Portugal more broadly, suggesting some caution is needed when using them to examine changes in growth patterns over time. Results indicate that the most significant decline in stunting - reflecting the greatest improvement in the standard of living - occurred after, not before, the democratic transition of 1974.