Nutritional status in Nepal : analyzing the determinants of nutritional outcomes along the distribution

Abstract

Undernutrition in very young children can have long lasting effects for them personally, as well as for the economy that is impacted by their lowered human capital formation. Despite its higher than average undernutrition rate, Nepal’s undernutrition problem has rarely been studied. Using Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys 2016, a nationally representative survey, this paper conducts OLS and quantile regression analyses at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles to shed light on the determinants of undernutrition. This study finds that the ecological zone in which a child lives can have a great impact on their nutritional status, with children from mountainous areas being more prone to stunting, and children from the terai being at a far greater risk of wasting, holding everything else constant. Additionally, wealth is found to have a strong effect on a child’s height-for-age z-scores, indicating that access to resources is an important determinant for this measure of nutritional status. This is the first paper to use the quantile regression approach in Nepal, and the most recent study to observe the effects of nutrition on Nepal as a whole.