Malnutrition and Income: Are We Being Misled? (A Dissenting View).

This paper takes issue with most evidence in the literature on poverty that attempts to show that increasing household income alone is not enough to significantly combat malnutrition in impoverished areas of the world. It reviews these claims in the literature and argues that the cut-off points for poverty lines taken to measure the significance of improvements in household income have been estimated at absolute poverty levels too low to show measurable improvements in the nutritional status of women and children in the short term. The paper asserts that not enough is actually understood about the timing or degree of responsiveness of nutritional outcomes to economic measures, such as how nutritional outcomes are affected as disposable income increases. It further explores how income elasticity of demand assessments are central to counter the misleading perception that improvements in income alone do not lead to measurable improved nutritional status of vulnerable groups. (Contains 49 references.) (MDM)