Environmental and Socio-economic drivers of child anthropometric failures in selected countries of South Asia

Abstract The pervasiveness of malnutrition among children under five is unacceptably high in South Asia. Assessment of overall burden of malnutrition with summation of Gomez and Waterlow’s three class divisions in Svedberg formulated composite index of anthropometric failure (CIAF) and Nandy’s revised CIAF have overlooked the incidence of overnutrition and their possible connections with other subgroups. This study proposes a new scheme; an extended version of CIAF as developed by Kuiti & Bose (2018), to accurately estimates the prevalence of anthropometric failures. The study also examines the effects of socio-economic and environmental variables on child malnutrition in selected South Asian countries include Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. For empirical analysis, panel cointegration technique is employed by using data for the period of 1990 to 2018. All the variables are stationary at first difference. Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS) method is applied to explore the parameter estimates. The results showed that political stability, prevalence of undernourishment, anemia in children, mother’s education, household size, dependency ratio, air pollution and unimproved sanitation significantly correlated with childhood undernutrition. The findings also testified long-run cointegrating relationship among the variables.