The basic objective of the project is to improve our understanding of the dependence of health and nutrition on income, relative prices, schooling, and observed and unobserved """"""""endowments"""""""" (including those determined by public policy). Contributions are possible both because of new data and because of modes of analysis not applied to these issues before. Critical new aggregate data include better income, expenditure, and price data from the International Comparison Project (ICP) and better mortality measures from the World Fertility Survey (WFS) and the UN. Useful new micro data include health and nutrient observations on individuals, as well as on households, from rural India. The modes of analysis include: (1) standard cross-country estimates of health-income associations and changes over time in such associations; (2) aggregate and micro demand system estimates with sufficient disaggregation of food categories so that the substitution between nutrient and nonnutrient characteristics of food and how it changes with income and demographic characteristics can be explored; (3) aggregate and micro health production relations, with latent variable controls for unobserved endowments in addition to observed factors; and (4) micro estimation of efficiency-productivity tradeoffs and possible sex discrimination in intrafamilial nutrient allocations.
