Support for agriculture during economic transformation: impacts on poverty and undernutrition.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Webb P
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3411984 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Body weight support (BWS) systems are a common tool used in gait rehabilitation. BWS systems may alter the requirements for an individual to actively stabilize by 1) providing lateral restoring forces that reduce the requirements for the nervous system to actively stabilize and 2) decreasing the stabilizing gravitational moment in the frontal plane, which could increase the requirements to actively stabilize. The goal of the current study was to quantify the interaction between BWS and lateral stability. We hypothesized that when able-bodied people walk with BWS: 1) the lateral restoring forces provided by BWS would reduce the requirements to stabilize in the frontal plane when comparing dynamically similar gaits, and 2) increasing BWS would decrease the stabilizing gravitational moment in the frontal plane and increase the requirements to stabilize when speed is constrained. Our findings partly support these hypotheses, but indicate a complex interaction between BWS and lateral stability. With BWS, subjects significantly decreased step width variability and significantly increased step width (p<0.05) for both the dynamically similar and Speed-Matched conditions. The decrease in step width variability may be attributable to a combination of lateral restoring forces decreasing the mechanical requirements to stabilize and an enhanced sense of position that could have improved locomotor control. Increases in step width when walking with high levels of BWS could have been due to decreases in the gravitational moment about the stance limb, which may challenge the control of stability in multiple planes.
| S-EPMC5056129 | biostudies-other
Project description:BackgroundPolicy discussions and debates in the last couple of decades emphasized efficiency of development policies for translating economic growth to development. One of the key aspects in this regard in the developing world is achieving improved nutrition through economic development. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of literature that empirically verifies the association between economic growth and reduction of childhood undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries. Thus, the aim of the study is to assess the interplay between economic growth and reduction of childhood undernutrition in Ethiopia.MethodsThe study used pooled data of three rounds (2000, 2005 and 2010) from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) of Ethiopia. A multilevel mixed logistic regression model with robust standard errors was utilized in order to account for the hierarchical nature of the data. The dependent variables were stunting, underweight, and wasting in children in the household. The main independent variable was real per capita income (PCI) that was adjusted for purchasing power parity. This information was obtained from World Bank.ResultsA total of 32,610 children were included in the pooled analysis. Overall, 11,296 (46.7%) [46.0%-47.3%], 8,197(33.8%) [33.2%-34.4%] and 3,175(13.1%) [12.7%-13.5%] were stunted, underweight, and wasted, respectively. We found a strong correlation between prevalence of early childhood undernutrition outcomes and real per capita income (PCI). The proportions of stunting (r = -0.1207, p<0.0001), wasting (r = -0.0338, p<0.0001) and underweight (r = -0.1035, p<0.0001) from the total children in the household were negatively correlated with the PCI. In the final model adjustment with all the covariates, economic growth substantially reduced stunting [β = -0.0016, SE = 0.00013, p<0.0001], underweight [β = -0.0014, SE = 0.0002, p<0.0001] and wasting [β = -0.0008, SE = 0.0002, p<0.0001] in Ethiopia over a decade.ConclusionEconomic growth reduces child undernutrition in Ethiopia. This verifies the fact that the economic growth of the country accompanied with socio-economic development and improvement of the livelihood of the poor. Direct nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive interventions could also be recommended in order to have an impact on the massive reduction of childhood undernutrition in the country.
| S-EPMC4979960 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a principal component of global climate variability known to influence a host of social and economic outcomes, but its systematic effects on human health remain poorly understood. We estimate ENSO's association with child nutrition at global scale by combining variation in ENSO intensity from 1986-2018 with children's height and weight from 186 surveys conducted in 51 teleconnected countries, containing 48% of the world's under-5 population. Warmer El Niño conditions predict worse child undernutrition in most of the developing world, but better outcomes in the small number of areas where precipitation is positively affected by warmer ENSO. ENSO's contemporaneous effects on child weight loss are detectable years later as decreases in height. This relationship looks similar at both global and regional scale, and has not appreciably weakened over the last four decades. Results imply that almost 6 million additional children were underweight during the 2015 El Niño compared to a counterfactual of neutral ENSO conditions in 2015. This demonstrates a pathway through which human well-being remains subject to predictable climatic processes.
| S-EPMC8511020 | biostudies-literature
Project description:How can foreign aid to agriculture support economic growth in Africa? This paper constructs a geographically indexed applied general equilibrium model that considers pathways through which aid might affect growth and structural transformation of labor markets in the context of soil nutrient variation, minimum subsistence consumption requirements, domestic transport costs, labor mobility, and constraints to self-financing of agricultural inputs.Using plausible parameters, the model is presented for Uganda as an illustrative case.We present three stylized scenarios to demonstrate the potential economy-wide impacts of both soil nutrient loss and replenishment, and how foreign aid can be targeted to support agricultural inputs that boost rural productivity and shift labor to boost real wages. One simulation shows how a temporary program of targeted official development assistance (ODA) for agriculture could generate, contrary to traditional Dutch disease concerns, an expansion in the primary tradable sector and positive permanent productivity and welfare effects, leading to a steady decline in the need for complementary ODA for budget support.
| S-EPMC7797631 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Including the parameterization of land management practices into Earth System Models has been shown to influence the simulation of regional climates, particularly for temperature extremes. However, recent model development has focused on implementing irrigation where other land management practices such as conservation agriculture (CA) has been limited due to the lack of global spatially explicit datasets describing where this form of management is practiced. Here, we implement a representation of CA into the Community Earth System Model and show that the quality of simulated surface energy fluxes improves when including more information on how agricultural land is managed. We also compare the climate response at the subgrid scale where CA is applied. We find that CA generally contributes to local cooling (~1°C) of hot temperature extremes in mid-latitude regions where it is practiced, while over tropical locations CA contributes to local warming (~1°C) due to changes in evapotranspiration dominating the effects of enhanced surface albedo. In particular, changes in the partitioning of evapotranspiration between soil evaporation and transpiration are critical for the sign of the temperature change: a cooling occurs only when the soil moisture retention and associated enhanced transpiration is sufficient to offset the warming from reduced soil evaporation. Finally, we examine the climate change mitigation potential of CA by comparing a simulation with present-day CA extent to a simulation where CA is expanded to all suitable crop areas. Here, our results indicate that while the local temperature response to CA is considerable cooling (>2°C), the grid-scale changes in climate are counteractive due to negative atmospheric feedbacks. Overall, our results underline that CA has a nonnegligible impact on the local climate and that it should therefore be considered in future climate projections.
| S-EPMC6175211 | biostudies-other
Project description:It is important to understand whether the publics' attitudes towards sugary beverage taxes (SBT) change after tax implementation to ensure the long-term success of tax policies. Seattle's SBT went into effect on January 1, 2018. We administered a mixed-mode survey to adults in Seattle and comparison areas, pre- and 2-years post-tax, to evaluate the impact of the SBT on 1) tax support and 2) perceived tax impacts (N = 2,933). Using a difference-in-differences approach, we employed adjusted income-stratified modified Poisson models to test the impacts of the tax on net changes in attitudes in Seattle versus the comparison areas, pre- to post-tax. Among lower-income individuals in Seattle, support for the tax increased by 14% (PRDD: 1.14; 95% CI: 1.08, 1.21) and there was a 20% net-increase in the perception that the SBT would positively affect the economy (PRDD: 1.20; 95% CI: 1.05, 1.39), compared to changes in the comparison areas. Among higher-income individuals in Seattle, support for the tax was not different (PRDD: 0.93; 95% CI: 0.70, 1.22) pre- to post-tax, but there was a net-increase in the perception that the tax would have negative effects on small businesses (PRDD: 1.44; 95% CI: 1.03, 2.00) and family finances (PRDD: 1.86; 95% CI: 1.09, 3.19). After living with the tax for 2-years, support for the tax increased among lower-income individuals in Seattle. Tax support was high and unchanged among higher-income individuals, but overall attitudes became more negative. Policy makers should consider investing in ongoing campaigns that explain the benefits of SSB taxes and revenues.
| S-EPMC9152812 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Strategies to address undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) include various interventions implemented through different sectors of the economy. Our aim is to provide an overview of published economic evaluations of such interventions and to compare and contrast evaluations of interventions in different areas. We reviewed economic evaluations of nutrition interventions in LMICs published since 2015 and/or included in the Tufts Global registry or Disease Control Priorities 3rd edition. We categorized the studies by intervention type (preventive; therapeutic; fortification; delivery platforms), nutritional deficiency addressed and characteristics of the economic evaluation (e.g. type of model, costs and outcomes included). Of the 62 economic evaluations identified, 56 (90%) were cost-effectiveness analyses. Twenty-two (36%) evaluations investigated fortification and 23 (37%) preventive interventions. Forty-three percent of the evaluations of preventive interventions did not include a model, whereas most of fortification strategies used the same reference model. We identified different trends in cost categories and inclusion of health and non-health outcomes across evaluations in the four different topic areas. To illustrate the implications of such trends for decision-making, we compared a set of studies evaluating alternative strategies to combat zinc deficiency. We showed that the use of 'off-the-shelf' models and tools can potentially conceal what outcomes and costs and value judgements are used. Comparing interventions across different areas is fundamental to assist decision-makers in developing their nutrition strategy. Systematic differences in the economic evaluations of interventions delivered within and outside the health sector can undermine the ability to prioritize alternative nutrition strategies.
| S-EPMC8128006 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This study sought to understand the relationships between neighborhood poverty, family monetary well-being, and child maltreatment. The specific research questions were as follows: (1) Is neighborhood poverty at age 1 related to child physical abuse, psychological abuse, and neglect at age 5? (2) Are these relationships mediated by family monetary well-being? The study relied on data from three waves (child ages 1, 3, and 5) of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth-cohort study of 4,898 children from 20 large U.S. cities. Structural equation modeling was employed to examine mediational effects. The study found a lasting impact of neighborhood poverty on child neglect only, and this relationship was fully mediated by family monetary well-being. There was not a significant longitudinal relationship between neighborhood poverty and physical abuse or psychological abuse. Implications from the study suggest that neighborhood disadvantage impacts a families' economic well-being, and that individual-level economic supports may interrupt the pathway from neighborhood poverty to child neglect.
| S-EPMC10276351 | biostudies-literature
Project description:It is widely recognized that increasing agricultural production to the levels needed to feed an expanding world population requires sharply increased public investment in research and development and widespread adoption of new technologies, but funding for national and international agricultural research has rather declined in recent years. In this situation, priority setting has become increasingly important for allocating scarce research resources among competing needs to achieve greater impacts. Using partial equilibrium economic surplus models and poverty impact simulations, this paper assesses cassava research priorities in Africa, Latin America and Caribbean, and Asia based on the potential economic and poverty reduction impacts of alternative research and technology options. The results showed that efficient planting material production and distribution systems and sustainable crop and soil fertility management practices have the greatest expected economic and poverty reduction impacts in the three regions. Lack of clean planting materials is a major constraint to adoption and it is envisaged that efficient production and distribution systems for planting material can accelerate technology adoption by farmers. Similarly, sustainable crop and soil fertility management practices play a key role in closing the observed yield gaps, especially in Africa. The paper discusses the results of the priority assessment for key cassava research options and concludes with the implications for cassava research priorities.
| S-EPMC6082557 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundEconomic growth is widely perceived as a major policy instrument in reducing childhood undernutrition in India. We assessed the association between changes in state per capita income and the risk of undernutrition among children in India.Methods and findingsData for this analysis came from three cross-sectional waves of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted in 1992-93, 1998-99, and 2005-06 in India. The sample sizes in the three waves were 33,816, 30,383, and 28,876 children, respectively. After excluding observations missing on the child anthropometric measures and the independent variables included in the study, the analytic sample size was 28,066, 26,121, and 23,139, respectively, with a pooled sample size of 77,326 children. The proportion of missing data was 12%-20%. The outcomes were underweight, stunting, and wasting, defined as more than two standard deviations below the World Health Organization-determined median scores by age and gender. We also examined severe underweight, severe stunting, and severe wasting. The main exposure of interest was per capita income at the state level at each survey period measured as per capita net state domestic product measured in 2008 prices. We estimated fixed and random effects logistic models that accounted for the clustering of the data. In models that did not account for survey-period effects, there appeared to be an inverse association between state economic growth and risk of undernutrition among children. However, in models accounting for data structure related to repeated cross-sectional design through survey period effects, state economic growth was not associated with the risk of underweight (OR 1.01, 95% CI 0.98, 1.04), stunting (OR 1.02, 95% CI 0.99, 1.05), and wasting (OR 0.99, 95% CI 0.96, 1.02). Adjustment for demographic and socioeconomic covariates did not alter these estimates. Similar patterns were observed for severe undernutrition outcomes.ConclusionsWe failed to find consistent evidence that economic growth leads to reduction in childhood undernutrition in India. Direct investments in appropriate health interventions may be necessary to reduce childhood undernutrition in India. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.
| S-EPMC3050933 | biostudies-literature