Large-scale school meal programs and student health: Evidence from rural China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Large-scale school meal programs and student health: Evidence from rural China write by Wang, Jingxi. This book was released on 2021-03-18. Large-scale school meal programs and student health: Evidence from rural China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Reducing urban-rural gaps in child health and nutrition is one of the most difficult challenges faced by many countries. This paper evaluates the impact of the Nutrition Improvement Program (NIP), a large-scale school meal program in rural China, on the health and nutritional status of compulsory education students aged 6-16. We use data from multiple rounds of the China Health and Nutrition Survey between 2004-2015 and implement a quasi-experimental approach exploiting cross-county variations in program implementation. We find that NIP participation is, on average, associated with a higher height-for-age z-score in the order of 0.22-0.42 standard deviations. The impacts are larger among students in a better health condition but small or not significant among the most disadvantaged. We do not observe heterogeneous effects across several individual and household characteristics. We also do not find significant effects on Body Mass Index-for-age and weight-for-age z scores. The results suggest that NIP partially improved students’ health over the first years of implementation, but more support is needed to achieve broader impacts that effectively reach all vulnerable students. Several robustness checks support our findings.
Education and Nutrition Problems in Rural China
Education and Nutrition Problems in Rural China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Education and Nutrition Problems in Rural China write by Rong Shi. This book was released on 2017. Education and Nutrition Problems in Rural China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The increasing inequality between rural and urban China has raised many concerns for Chinese scholars. A large gap exists not only in income but in health and education. The rural-urban disparities in health and education may contribute to greater income inequality in the future, thus leading to a vicious cycle. This study explores the factors that contribute to the increasing inequality in health and education between rural and urban China. Using a randomized controlled trial in Shaanxi province, the first chapter studies the effectiveness of a supplemental meal program in improving students' development outcomes. This study also compares the impact of the supplemental meal program on students' health and educational outcomes with other nutritional interventions: the parent training program and the vitamin supplement program. Using a fixed effects model, I find that the supplement breakfast program is effective in improving students' health outcomes, but not their educational performances. Compared with other intervention methods, it has similar impacts to a vitamin supplement program. All three nutritional interventions are ineffective in improving students' educational performances. The parent training program has no impact on any student development outcome. The second chapter uses the China Family Panel Survey (CFPS), a nationally representative survey to investigate net impact of parental migration on left children's health and nutrition outcomes. My measurements of children's health outcomes are height-for-age z-score (HAZ), weight-for-age z-score (WAZ) and self-perceived health rating. The results show that absence of both parents has a significant negative impact on children's health outcomes in terms of HAZ and self-rated health status. These findings suggest that left-behind children are worse off in terms of physical development and self-perceived health status when compared to their peers who live with their parents. Furthermore, there is a gender disparity in the effect of parental absence on children's health outcomes. The adverse impact is more prominent for boys than girls, indicating that boys are in a more disadvantaged position than girls under the trend of increasing internal migration in China. The third chapter uses CFPS to study the social economic determinants of shadow education and its impact on student's academic performance. Moreover, it uses a logistic regression model to study what social-economic factors determine the participation of shadow education. Findings reveal that children's nutrition conditions, family income, mother's education, parent's expectation, whether living in a rural or urban area and whether attending a key school all have a positive impact on the shadow education participation. As for the effectiveness of shadow education in improving children's academic performance, the results are mixed. I find no significant impact of shadow education on children's standardized test scores, when using the private tutoring participation dummy variable in the regression alone. After including the time and money spent on shadow education to control for variation in shadow education's quantity and quality, I find that shadow education has a significant positive impact on children's math test scores but not word test scores.
Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population
Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population write by . This book was released on 2007. Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Abstract: In 2003, after over 20 years of minimal health insurance coverage in rural areas, China launched a heavily subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. The authors use program and household survey data, as well as health facility census data, to analyze factors affecting enrollment into the program and to estimate its impact on households and health facilities. They obtain estimates by combining differences-in-differences with matching methods. The authors find some evidence of lower enrollment rates among poor households, holding other factors constant, and higher enrollment rates among households with chronically sick members. The household and facility data point to the scheme significantly increasing both outpatient and inpatient utilization (by 20-30 percent), but they find no impact on utilization in the poorest decile. For the sample as a whole, the authors find no statistically significant effects on average out-of-pocket spending, but they do find some-albeit weak-evidence of increased catastrophic health spending. For the poorest decile, by contrast, they find that the scheme increased average out-of-pocket spending but reduced the incidence of catastrophic health spending. They find evidence that the program has increased ownership of expensive equipment among central township health centers but had no impact on cost per case.
Nutrition and Educational Performance in Rural China's Elementary Schools
Nutrition and Educational Performance in Rural China's Elementary Schools - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Nutrition and Educational Performance in Rural China's Elementary Schools write by Renfu Luo. This book was released on 2013. Nutrition and Educational Performance in Rural China's Elementary Schools available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Background: Despite growing wealth and a strengthening commitment from the government to provide quality education, a significant share of students across rural China still have inadequate access to micronutrient-rich regular diets. Such poor diets can lead to nutritional problems, such as iron-deficiency anemia, that can adversely affect attention and learning in school. Objective: The overall goal of this paper is to test whether simple nutritional interventions lower rates of anemia and to assess whether this leads to improved educational performance among students in poor areas of rural China. Approach: We report on the results of a randomized control trial (RCT) involving over 3600 fourth grade students, mostly aged 9 to 12, from 66 randomly-chosen elementary schools in 8 of the poorest counties in Shaanxi Province in China's poor northwest region. The design called for random assignment of schools to one of three groups: two different types of treatment/intervention schools; a non-intervention, control group. The two interventions were designed to improve hemoglobin (Hb) levels, which is a measure of iron deficiency. One intervention provided a daily multivitamin with mineral supplements, including 5 milligrams of iron, for 5 months. The other informed the parents of their child's anemia status and suggested several courses of action (henceforth, the information treatment). Findings: Some 38.3 percent of the students had Hb levels of below 120 g/L, the World Health Organization's cutoff for anemia for children 9 to 12 years old. In the schools that received the multivitamins with mineral supplements, Hb levels rose by more than 2 g/L (about 0.2 standard deviations). The standardized math test scores of the students in the schools that received the multivitamin with mineral supplements also improved significantly. In schools that received the information treatment, only students that lived at home (and not the students that lived in boarding schools and took most of their meals at schools) registered positive improvements in their Hb levels. The reductions in anemia rates and improvements in test scores were greater for students that were anemic at the beginning of the study period. Overall, these results should encourage China's Ministry of Education (MOE) to begin to widen its view of education (beyond teachers, facilities and curriculum) and provide better nutrition and health care for students.
Invisible China
Invisible China - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Invisible China write by Scott Rozelle. This book was released on 2020-09-29. Invisible China available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster. As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Praise for Invisible China “Stunningly researched.” —TheEconomist, Best Books of the Year (UK) “Invisible China sounds a wake-up call.” —The Strategist “Not to be missed.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) “[Invisible China] provides an extensive coverage of problems for China in the sphere of human capital development . . . the book is rich in content and is not constrained only to China, but provides important parallels with past and present developments in other countries.” —Journal of Chinese Political Science
