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The Effects of Malnutrition on the Academic Performance of Students

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The detrimental effect of malnutrition on school achievement
Evidence from two districts of Madagascar

Frédéric Aubery∗ October 2012

Abstract The numerous school feeding programs around the world rest on the assumption that better nutrition leads to better results at school but the relationship between nutrition and school achievement is complex and difficult to estimate. Unobservable school, parents and child’s characteristics could have an impact on both nutrition and educational outcomes, resulting in a severe endogeneity problem. Based on a large data set from Madagascar (with nearly 6000 pupils), this paper tries to estimate the causal relationship between nutrition and school achievement with the help of an instrumental variable method. Variation in the total amount of rainfall from a year to an other during the five first years of a child’s life is used as an exogenous instrument to predict the long term nutritional status. Once instrumented the effect of nutrition over test scores appears to be larger, meaning that OLS estimates of this relationship were underestimated. Keywords : Nutrition, education, school feeding program. JEL codes : I25 , O12.

PhD Candidate - Centre d’Etude et de Recherche sur le Développement International (CERDI) fred.aubery@gmail.com


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Introduction

Despite their high intervention costs, school feeding programs are widespread accross the world. According to Galloway et al. [2009], the mean cost of a school feeding program (SFP) is of US$40 per child per year. In Madagascar, for the school year 2011/2012, giving kids a meal that corresponds to a food intake of 603 kilocalories for 175 days costs US$35 per kid. Obviously, this average cost is very sensitive to food and transport price rises. During the 2008 food price crisis, the average meal cost per kid per day had risen from US$0.19 to US$0.30 in Madagascar,

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