IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/yor/hectdg/25-08.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Relationship Between Poverty and Children’s Nutritional Status: Evidence from Nigeria

Author

Listed:
  • Aregbeshola, B.S.;
  • Salmasi, L.;
  • Shomali, K.W.A.;

Abstract

People living in poverty generally do not have proper access to food and nutrition, with negative consequences for their children’s health and possible long-term negative effects in terms of human capital accumulation, health, and labor market achievements. In this paper, we examine the relationship between poverty and children’s nutritional status using the 2008, 2013, and 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Surveys. We adopt an approach based on instrumental variables to control for endogeneity. Our study finds that poverty reduced weight-for-height, weight-for-age, and height-for-age Z-scores by 21.32, 30.33, and 27.67 percentage points, respectively. We also find that poverty increases the likelihood of a child being wasted, underweight, and stunted by 5.99, 5.49, and 6.99 percentage points. We show that the mechanisms underlying the relationship between poverty and children’s nutritional status are health care service utilization, maternal health care service use, household nutrition, child-specific nutrition intake, maternal nutrition, and illness episodes.

Suggested Citation

  • Aregbeshola, B.S.; & Salmasi, L.; & Shomali, K.W.A.;, 2025. "The Relationship Between Poverty and Children’s Nutritional Status: Evidence from Nigeria," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 25/08, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.
    • Handle: RePEc:yor:hectdg:25/08
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.york.ac.uk/media/economics/documents/hedg/workingpapers/2025/2508.pdf
    File Function: Main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • C18 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Methodolical Issues: General
    • C26 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Instrumental Variables (IV) Estimation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:yor:hectdg:25/08. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jane Rawlings (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deyoruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.