Child malnutrition and school performance in China

This paper uses data on the height, weight, age and grade level of over 3000 children in five quite different locations to measure the impact of the nutritional variables on the available measure of school performance. Children tend to be about one grade further behind in rural areas than in the provincial capitals, and about one-half a grade further behind in the provicial capitals than in Beijing. Even after controlling for location, however, lower nutritional status was found to affect school performance adversely; a one standard deviation reduction in height for age, for example, would result in a child's being about one third of a year further behind. Though results from a geographically limited sample should be generalized only with extreme caution, it does appear likely that malnutrition in rural China remained sufficiently prevalent in 1979 to retard the school advancement of large numbers of children.