Do Different Types of Assets Have Differential Effects on Child Education?: Evidence from Tanzania.

To assess the conventional view that assets uniformly improve childhood development through wealth effects, this paper tests whether different types of assets have different effects on child education. The analysis indicates that household durables and housing quality have the expected positive effects, but agricultural assets have adverse effects on highest grade completed and no effects on exam performance. Extending the standard agricultural-household model by explicitly including child labor, the study uses three waves of panel data from Tanzania to estimate the effects of household assets on child education. The analysis corrects for the endogeneity of assets and uses a Hausman-Taylor instrumental variable panel data estimator to identify the effects of time-invariant observables and more efficiently control for time-invariant unobservables. The negative effect of agricultural assets is more pronounced among rural children and children from farming households, presumably due to the higher opportunity cost of their schooling.

The Importance of Animal Source Foods for Nutrient Sufficiency in the Developing World: The Zambia Scenario.

There have been successful interventions fortifying staple foods to mobilize micronutrients as well as agricultural efforts to raise yields of staple foods to increase food availability. Zambia serves as an interesting case study because since 1961 there has been a notable decline in the availability of animal source foods (ASFs) and pulses and a significant increase in the supply of cassava and vegetable oils. The shift in food availability was partly attributed to the agricultural success in high-yielding and drought-resistant varieties that made cassava and oil crops more affordable and readily available. In this research, we explore another policy strategy that involves ASF as a mechanism to help remedy micronutrient inadequacies in a population. A scenario modeling analysis compares the changes in the nutrient profile of the Zambian diet through adding either staple plant source foods (PSFs) or ASFs. The scenarios under study involve the addition of (1) 18 fl oz of whole cow's milk; (2) 60 g of beef, 30 g of chicken, and 5 g of beef liver; (3) milk plus meat; or (4) 83 g of maize flour, 123 g of cassava, and other staple PSF, that is, isocaloric to the "milk + meat" group. The findings alert program planners and policy makers to the value of increasing the availability, accessibility, and utilization of ASF to simultaneously address multiple nutrient deficiencies, as well as the nutrition challenges that remain when expanding the availability of plant-based staples.