How rich your State was the year you were born is a direct predictor of how tall you will grow, new research shows. But the relationship between a State’s income and the height of its residents is growing weaker over time, possibly as a result of inequality within States. Faster growing States will not necessarily get healthier and taller at an equally fast rate, especially if their inequality levels are high.
Economist Diane Coffey, a PhD candidate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, and demographers Aparajita Chattopadhyay, an assistant professor at the International Institute of Population Studies (IIPS), and Rajan Gupt, a research scholar at IIPS, compared net state domestic product per capita (NSDP) with the height of the population in the State and other health data obtained from two rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) — 1998-99 and 2005-06. They found a robust relationship between the NSDP for the year preceding the NFHS rounds and the heights of children aged 2 to 3.
In 2005-6 , the tallest children were in Tamil Nadu, Goa and Delhi and the shortest in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; there was a difference of nearly 4.5 cm between the average Tamil Nadu child aged 3 and the average Bihar child aged 3.
Growth in state domestic product per capita between the two rounds of the NFHS (1998-99 and 2005-6) was however not directly correlated with improvements in stunting. “Health improvement is a combined effort of socio-economic development, medical advancement as well as other factors like improvement in health facilities and women’s access. Even though India may be doing well economically, we are lagging behind on many such developmental parameters,” Ms. Chattopadhyay explained. “Inequality could be another plausible answer. Higher income States have almost the same average levels of inequality as lower income states, and there is a strong correlation between income inequality and health problems,” Ms. Chattopadhyay added.
In another working paper, Ms. Coffey compared state domestic products between 1970 and 1983, with the heights of adults born between those years. Since Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist, has found that Indians reach their maximum height only by their early 20s, Ms. Coffey looked at adults who were at least 22 as of 2005, the year when the third round of NFHS was conducted. She found that state domestic product at the birth year was a robust predictor of adult height.
