The basic objective of the proposed project is to explore how household behavior mediates the impact of agricultural pricing and health policies and changing economic systems on food and nutrient intakes, on health, mortality and nutritional status and on productivity outcomes, including the intrahousehold distributions of those intakes and outcomes, in parallel analyses of five rural Asian and African populations in Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, Kenya, and Burkina Faso. The project will involve a combination of systematic modeling of the household based on a common framework, rich micro economic data, and sophisticated estimation techniques. The basic model incorporates the household production of health, consumption choices, and agricultural production with emphasis on a range of price effects, and on the roles of individuals, household, and community endowments. The data sets are all derived from household surveys and are unique in providing detailed information on individual food and nutrient consumption, individual health outcomes, critical food and non-food prices and wages, and community characteristics, such as the availability of health services. The estimation techniques to be used include procedures to control for selectivity associated with mortality (e.g., health production functions can be estimated only for those who have survived to be in the data set), heterogeneity in unobserved characteristics (e.g., inherent robustness of individuals), and unobserved individual, household and community characteristics (e.g., the general health environment). The undertaking of parallel analyses for five different developing country settings will result in a substantial increment in our understanding of how various policies and market changes affect mortality and health outcomes in the developing world and will allow replication and assessments of the robustness of results across different settings.
