Course number: L&S 88-1
Instructor: Sarah Anne Reynolds

Child nutrition and education are important for adult success, but children in developing countries fall behind with nutritional consumption and have fewer educational opportunities. Household surveys are an instrumental tool for understanding factors associated with investments in children. We will use household data sets to explore relationships between nutrition and education outcomes and a variety of socio-economic variables to establish an understanding of contextual elements which can hinder or promote child growth and learning. We will assess disparities in outcomes by poverty status, sex, and age. Household surveys are key tools for national policy, as they provide data that allow us to monitor a variety of development outcomes and evaluate policy aimed at improving them.

We will work with the World Bank’s Living Standards and Measurement Surveys. This set of surveys have standardized data across countries. Small groups of students will work together on a specific country for which data has been collected within the last decade.

Final project: Select an additional topic that has data available on your country survey. Describe survey instruments used to assess that area and explain their strengths and weaknesses. Add 3 new variables of interest to your data set and develop additional analyses. Write a 3 page policy brief in the style of the LSMS policy briefs. Be sure to include some contextual information about your country.