An Evaluation Of The Impact Of Progresa On Pre-School Child Height

The nutrition of preschool children is of considerable interest not only because of concern over their immediate welfare, but also because their nutrition in this formative stage of life is widely perceived to have substantial persistent impact on their physical and mental development and on their health status as adults. Children’s physical and mental development shapes their later lives by affecting their schooling success and post-schooling productivity. Improving the nutritional status of currently malnourished preschoolers may, therefore, have important payoffs over the long term. Within rural Mexico, stunting, or short height relative to standards established for healthy populations, is the major form of protein-energy malnutrition (PEM). Low weight for height, or wasting, is much less of a problem. But stunting is symptomatic of longer-term effects of early childhood malnutrition. One of the major components of the PROGRESA program has been directed toward improving the nutritional status of children in poor rural communities in Mexico. Cross-sectional comparisons of height for children who received PROGRESA treatment versus others who were in PROGRESA-eligible households but who did not receive treatment suggest no positive effect of PROGRESA, either on average child height or on the proportion of children who are stunted, i.e., more than two standard deviations below recognized norms. But these comparisons may be misleading because of the failure to control for unobserved child, parental and household, and market and community characteristics that may be correlated with children receiving the PROGRESA treatment, or because of the failure to control for systematic initial differences. For example, on average, the children in the control sample tended to have better anthropometric status than children in the treatment sample. The preferred estimates used in this study control for these factors. PROGRESA treatment is represented by those who reportedly receiv(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)