Deep-rooted preferences for firstborn sons in India lead to malnutrition in other children, says economist Seema Jayachandran
You study economics of child malnutrition. What is the "south Asian enigma"?
It is the fact that Indian and other south Asian children are more malnourished than children in equally poor, or poorer, places. For example, on average, India is richer than sub-Saharan Africa, and it does better on many dimensions, including infant, adult and maternal mortality. But in terms of children's weight and height – indicators of nutrition or exposure to disease – Indian kids are smaller. They do worse.
How is this enigma typically explained?
There are generally two explanations. One is that this is just genetic, and there's no problem at all. The other is that it's caused by environmental factors. For example, recent research proposed that water contamination from defecating outside causes stunting and wasting. Fewer people in India use latrines compared with sub-Saharan Africa, so it could be part of the explanation. But I think we should be cautious about assuming there is just a single cause.
Your research suggests another possibility. What did you find?
Previous research found that, on average, Indian children are shorter than sub-Saharan African children. We looked at how this varied by birth order, and found that solely among firstborns, Indian children are actually taller. It's only when you get to subsequent children that you find that Indian children are shorter, and that gap gets bigger as you go down the birth order. This implies that the parents invest less in their kids over time.
What drives this drop-off in investment?
We found that it's not just related to birth order but to when Indian parents have their firstborn son. That makes sense as lots of other research shows that India has a strong religious, cultural and economic preference for firstborn sons. We looked into what parents are doing differently for their firstborn son, or, at the prenatal stage, of what could possibly be their firstborn son. It turns out that on almost all fronts – from prenatal care to postnatal check-ups to how well they're fed – they are treated better than their siblings.
What can be done about this problem?
We need to think about how to get parents to invest equally in their children, and to have a stronger desire to have girls. Many developing countries offer cash transfers to a family if they get prenatal care, say, or send their kids to school, and there are programmes in India that give parents cash if they have daughters.
That's probably not the right – or financially sustainable – way to change preferences, though. We are working with a group that is trying to change gender attitudes in secondary schools. We'll track those kids to see if it makes a difference when they start having children. Also, although enforcement can be difficult, there are legal reforms that give daughters the right to inherit equally, and laws against dowries and sex-selective abortions. So there are efforts under way to tackle the problem. But there is no magic bullet to change centuries of preferences.
This article appeared in print under the headline "An unhealthy favouritism"
Profile
Seema Jayachandran is an associate professor of economics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Her work focuses on economic issues in developing countries, in particular on the ways that parents invest in their children's health
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