Explaining stunting in nineteenth‐century France

Abstract

We examine the share of French men with stunted growth during the nineteenth century using data on potential army conscripts. The share of stunted men (those whose height was below 1.62 metres) in France's 82 departments declined dramatically across the century, especially in the south and west. Our models examine the role of education expenditure, health care personnel, local wages, asset distribution, and a dummy variable for Paris as determinants of stunting, decomposing changes over time into the effects of levels and returns to the various explanatory variables used in the model of heights. All covariates are strongly significant, with education spending being particularly important. Our evidence clearly indicates that living in congested Paris contributed to poor health

Stunting Rates in a Food-Rich Country: The Argentine Pampas from the 1850s to the 1950s

“…More recently authors have focused their attention on the question of past inequalities in the access of food and health by poor children, women and ethnic/racial minorities [20][21][22]. While in Europe and North America scholars had paid attention to the question of children's health and nutrition in the past (at least since the 18th century), in Latin America historical studies on children's heights are still rare [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

Received wisdom versus reality: height, nutrition, and urbanization in mid-nineteenth-century France

“…Other variables have been incorporated into models that are not included here for lack of 12FL02 satisfactory results: the annual number of work hours attributable to child labor, the extent of the 12FL03 migration of agricultural workers between districts, and various estimates of agricultural wages (whether 12FL04 real or nominal). It is surprising that there are no definitive results regarding wages, since their impact has 12FL05 been convincingly demonstrated at the departmental level (Weir 1997;Postel-Vinay and Sahn 2010). One 12FL06 possible explanation is that agricultural wages increased significantly during the reign of Napoleon III, 12FL07 benefiting members of the 1848 birth cohort shortly before they were measured as part of the conscription 12FL08 process, and thus blurring the height-wages correlation that might have been evident in 1852, when the 12FL09 conscripts were just toddlers.…”

“…Spain and France would seem to constitute a sort of latter-day version of an archaic Latin model whereby, in the absence of genuine industrial growth, small towns would benefit from their status as centers of traditional administrative, financial, and commercial concerns, since such a thriving economy would generate a relatively elevated standard of living, as indicated by a relatively elevated mean height. 2 However, it has been proved that certain regions of France experienced a height decline at the end of the eighteenth century or during the first half of the nineteenth century; a number of researchers, equipped with very different analytical techniques, have demonstrated that Parisians were shorter than their rural counterparts (Koch and Schubert 2011;Heyberger 2007;Komlos 1993;Soudjian 2008;Postel-Vinay and Sahn 2010).…”