Economic Theory of the Household and Impact Measurement of Nutrition and Related Health Programs

摘要

The paper conveys in broad terms an economist's approach to concepts and measurement of nutrition and related health programs. It is an outgrowth of an interdisciplinary research project involving the School of International Health of the Johns Hopkins University and the Development Economics Department of the World Bank. The project, which summarized the Narangwal intervention experiment in India, and policy interventions in general gave rise to the need for laying out informally the conceptual framework of the economic theory of the household and the relevance of the theory to evaluation research in nutrition. The paper is an attempt to meet this need by outlining, with no loss of generality, how the theory and its statistical adjunct--econometrics--can be used for suggesting testable hypotheses concerning program impact, defining outcome measures, and measuring program impact. (Copyright (c) 1978, The World Bank.)