Human capital, wealth, and nutrition in the Bolivian Amazon

Godoy, Ricardo; Reyes‐García, Victoria; Vadez, Vincent; Leonard, William R.; Huanca, Tomás; Bauchet, Jonathan

doi:10.1016/j.ehb.2005.01.001

Cited by 52 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 24 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We tried to find individuals when they returned to the village or when they moved to another village, but we did not try to find people who left Tsimane' territory. Elsewhere we show that those who dropped out did not differ from those who remained in the sample in observed socioeconomic or demographic variables (Godoy et al, 2005) so it is possible that attrition might not bias the estimates we present.…”

Section: Samplementioning

confidence: 84%

The Role of Community and Individuals in the Formation of Social Capital

et al. 2007

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Because social capital shapes many desirable socioeconomic outcomes, we ask what incentives drive private investments in social capital. We estimate the association between private investments in social capital (outcome variable) and the following explanatory variables: (a) individual-level variables from an optimal investment model, (b) spillovers from group social capital, (c) village income inequality, and (d) market openness. We draw on information from Tsimane', a native Amazonian society of foragers and farmers in Bolivia, and equate social capital with gifts, help given, and communal labor offered by the household. Age bore an inverted U-shaped and income bore a positive association with social capital, but geographic mobility, wealth, and schooling bore no significant association with social capital. We found strong group-level associations even after instrumenting social capital; the association probably stems from strong kinship ties which tend to blur the line between the group and the individual. Village measures of social capital were positively and significantly associated with private investments in social capital. We found some evidence that village income inequality and market openness were negatively associated with private investments in social capital.

show abstract

Section: Samplementioning

confidence: 84%

The Role of Community and Individuals in the Formation of Social Capital

et al. 2007

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…First, because we sought to assess aspects of socioeconomic differentiation related to recent nutritional change, we emphasized types of income and wealth that reflect market integration. This strategy differs from studies that include subsistence production in income calculations and locally produced goods in wealth calculations (e.g., Godoy et al 2005c). Second, the particulars of the Xavante situation facilitated our assessment of both monetary income and wealth, two commonly used indices of socioeconomic differentiation.…”

Section: Diachronic Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nutrition Transition, Socioeconomic Differentiation, and Gender Among Adult Xavante Indians, Brazilian Amazon

et al. 2009

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

High prevalence rates of overweight and obesity are increasingly common among indigenous Amazonian societies experiencing greater involvement in market economies. An important factor in such nutritional transition is internal socioeconomic differentiation, which partially accounts for fatness frequencies. We report the results of a diachronic anthropometric comparison and crosssectional anthropometric and socioeconomic survey of Xavante adults from a single, large community. Our data show an accelerated nutrition transition, with significant weight and BMI increases for males and females between 1962 and 2006. We also found income and wealth to be significantly associated with fatness measures for both sexes combined and for females separately. We interpret the observed gender differences as reflecting differences between male and female social dietary practices. Comparison with other studies in the Amazon region suggests that the relationships between internal socioeconomic differentiation and dietary health vary between cultural and economic settings. We also argue that parallels between Xavante health perspectives and epidemiological interpretations demonstrate the potential for proactive interchange between native and scientific health discourses.

show abstract

“…Humancapital variables include the subject's education and the subject's skills in Spanish, literacy, and in arithmetic, and the education of the subject's parents. We include own and (for children) parental human-capital variables because previous studies suggest that they help shape the nutritional status of people (Godoy et al, 2005a). ɛ ihct is a random, person-specific error term, or the growth rate in consumption left unexplained by the model.…”

Section: Statistical Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Well do Foragers Protect Food Consumption? Panel Evidence from a Native Amazonian Society in Bolivia

Godoy

Reyes‐García

Vadez³

et al. 2007

Hum Ecol

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ability of rural people to protect their food consumption matters because it captures their economic vulnerability. How well do foragers protect consumption from adverse income shocks and does protection work equally well for all people in the household? We answer the queries with data from 156 adults and 169 children collected over five consecutive quarters from the Tsimane', a native Amazonian society of foragers and farmers in Bolivia. We estimate whether quarterly changes in the logarithm of consumption bear an association with quarterly changes in the logarithm of cash income while controlling for many confounders, including covariant shocks. We use anthropometric indices of short-run nutritional status to proxy for food consumption and use instrumental variables to abate biases from the endogeneity of income. We found that child consumption was fully protected from income growth, but adult consumption was not as well protected. Estimates of income elasticities of consumption fell toward the lower range of estimates from previous studies of farming and industrial societies. We present several hypotheses to explain how the Tsimane' smooth consumption.

show abstract

Human capital, wealth, and nutrition in the Bolivian Amazon

Cited by 52 publications

References 24 publications

The Role of Community and Individuals in the Formation of Social Capital

The Role of Community and Individuals in the Formation of Social Capital

Nutrition Transition, Socioeconomic Differentiation, and Gender Among Adult Xavante Indians, Brazilian Amazon

How Well do Foragers Protect Food Consumption? Panel Evidence from a Native Amazonian Society in Bolivia

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About