Children who experience poor nutrition during the first 1000 days of life are more vulnerable to illness and death in the near term, as well as to lower work capacity and productivity as adults. These problems motivate research to identify basic and underlying factors that influence risks of child malnutrition. Based on a structured search of existing literature, we identified 90 studies that used statistical analyses to assess relationships between potential factors and major indicators of child malnutrition: stunting, wasting, and underweight. Our review determined that wasting, a measure of acute malnutrition, is substantially understudied compared to the other indicators. We summarize the evidence about relationships between child malnutrition and numerous factors at the individual, household, region/community, and country levels. Our results identify only select relationships that are statistically significant, with consistent signs, across multiple studies. Among the consistent predictors of child malnutrition are shocks due to variations in climate conditions (as measured with indicators of temperature, rainfall, and vegetation) and violent conflict. Limited research has been conducted on the relationship between violent conflict and wasting. Improved understanding of the variables associated with child malnutrition will aid advances in predictive modeling of the risks and severity of malnutrition crises and enhance the effectiveness of responses by the development and humanitarian communities.
Although countries throughout the developing world continue to increase their number of subnational administrative units, the consequences of administrative unit creation remain poorly understood. This paper argues that newly created administrative units face relative difficulty generating resources and staffing a full and competent bureaucracy, and as a result, are less capable of providing public goods to their constituencies. These challenges to administrative capacity are less consequential within mother units that were carved apart to create new splinter units and are entirely absent in nonsplitting units. Proxying the local provision of public goods with a measure of nighttime light intensity in Burkina Faso, the findings indicate that the public goods provision in newly created splinter provinces dropped significantly relative to prefragmentation levels, while other administrative units remained largely unaffected.
Why do developing countries commit to costly international agreements? Massive arbitral awards and the discovery that rich countries write investment rules have led to a newfound appreciation of the costs of bilateral investment treaties (BITs). Yet, developing countries continue to sign them. This article advances a novel argument for why governments sign potentially costly agreements. We argue that civil conflict changes the decision calculus of governments by rendering them domestically insecure. This insecurity makes governments more willing to sign agreements, like BITs, that sacrifice future policy autonomy. BITs can attract foreign direct investment (FDI) and signal competence, which have important domestic political benefits. BITs are also attractive postconflict since they can be copied quickly from past templates and require few ex ante policy changes. Empirical tests of over 150 countries from 1960 to 2012 demonstrate that governments sign more BITs after civil conflict. Additional tests indicate that postconflict BITs increase FDI inflows, especially after devastating conflict. Our results provide a unique perspective on why governments cede sovereignty to international institutions.
Despite early warning signs about threats to food security, humanitarian interventions often lag behind these warning signs. Climate and conflict conditions are among the most important factors preceding food system failures and malnutrition crises around the world. Research shows how conflict and climate conditions can upend functional food and economic systems, but this research does not address the severe health impacts of these conditions on infants and young children. Translating quantitative research findings into humanitarian interventions requires geographical detail, resulting in location-specific alerts of risks of food insecurity. We describe how the use of readily available, spatially referenced quantitative data can support targeted interventions for nutrition resiliency. Effective humanitarian programmes for targeted nutrition interventions require real-time datasets on food security drivers and models that can provide actionable guidance to mitigate negative impacts of conflict and climate conditions on the people most susceptible to food insecurity. Although treatment of acute malnutrition is important, treating existing malnutrition is not enough. Instead, action to prevent acute malnutrition should be taken to minimise suffering and to maximise wellbeing, particularly in contexts prone to worsening climate and conflict conditions.
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