Assessing Characteristic Differential in Dichotomous Outcomes: A Case of Child Undernourishment

This paper tries to highlight the importance of intensity and severity of any deprivation while comparing welfare outcomes across the groups for any given relevant characteristics. It argues that when one compares the distance between groups without taking into consideration the questions ‘how much’ and ‘how severe’ the deprivation is, the distance across groups may look modest. It becomes more pronounced once it is adjusted for intensity and severity across each group. For this purpose an application of standard Foster-Greer-Thorbecke method is quite useful. Information on prevalence of underweight among pre-school children from NFHS-3 has been used for the illustration. A comparison of the same measure of undernutrition is also made between NFHS-2 and NFHS-3 rounds for the children of age 0-35 months.