IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/col/000425/012574.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Birth Weight and Early Childhood Physical Health: Evidence from a Sample of Latin American Twins

Author

Listed:
  • Victor Saldarriaga Lescano

Abstract

This paper assesses the effect of birth weight on physical growth before age five. The identification strategy relies on within-twin estimation techniques using a sample of same-sex twins from the Demographic and Health Surveys for ten Latin American countries. Results suggest that increasing birth weight would augment height for age, reduce the probability of chronic malnourishment, and increase body mass of children from 0 to 59 months old. Results also show that post-natal health investments, such as vaccination and exclusive breastfeeding, do not mitigate the negative effects on physical growth of children caused by low birth weight. This would imply that is not possible to reassign resources aimed at young children’s health and nutrition from the pre- to the post-natal period without affecting physical development early in life. Overall, evidence suggests that programs aiming to enhance nutrition since the pre-natal period (arguably, in utero) in Latin America would lead to positive and permanent effects on children’s growth and successfully contribute to reducing malnourishment during the first years of life.

Suggested Citation

  • Victor Saldarriaga Lescano, 2015. "Birth Weight and Early Childhood Physical Health: Evidence from a Sample of Latin American Twins," Economía Journal, The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association - LACEA, vol. 0(Spring 20), pages 161-197, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:col:000425:012574
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://economia.lacea.org/contents.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Molina, Oswaldo & Saldarriaga, Victor, 2017. "The perils of climate change: In utero exposure to temperature variability and birth outcomes in the Andean region," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 111-124.
    2. Helgertz, Jonas & Nilsson, Anton, 2017. "The Effects of Birth Weight on Hospitalizations and Sickness Absences," Lund Papers in Economic History 157, Lund University, Department of Economic History.
    3. Molina, Oswaldo & Saldarriaga, Victor, 2018. "Child Exposure to Climate Change: A Regional Index of Vulnerability for Better-Targeted Policies," MPRA Paper 85073, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Jonas Helgertz & Anton Nilsson, 2019. "The effect of birth weight on hospitalizations and sickness absences: a longitudinal study of Swedish siblings," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 32(1), pages 153-178, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Birth weight; twins; height-for-age; chronic malnourishment; body mass index;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Behavior
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth

    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:col:000425:012574. 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: LACEA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/laceaea.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.