T HE dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance. In many countries, such as Bangladesh, national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods. However, little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake. The design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross-price elasticities for both target and non-target groups. The net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix. Results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption. In this study, demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5,750 rural Bangladeshi households. Estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis, such as household size, occupation and employment status, that are typically lost in aggregation. There is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data. This is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well-being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest. Moreover, the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters. Previous econometric analysis of income-class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory. Pinstrup-Anderson, de Londono and Hoover (1976) estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using Frisch's scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption. Their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid. Alderman and Timmer (1980), who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes, econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in Indonesia. The inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups. Although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich, the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income. I The formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section II below. Section III presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables. Section IV summarizes our findings.

[This paper considers the problem of specifying and estimating demand systems for samples which contain a significant proportion of observation with zero consumption of one or more goods. Our approach uses virtual prices, which are dual to the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, to select the set of goods consumed--the demand regime--and to transform binding nonnegativity constraints into nonbinding constraints. It has the advantage of permitting the use of indirect cost and utility functions such as the translog, and the analytic decomposition of demand effects for goods at the nonnegativity limit.]

This paper estimates the impact of participation, by gender, in the Grameen Bank and two other group‐based micro credit programs in Bangladesh on labor supply, schooling, household expenditure, and assets. The empirical method uses a quasi‐experimental survey design to correct for the bias from unobserved individual and village‐level heterogencity. We find that program credit has a larger effect on the behavior of poor households in Bangladesh when women are the program participants. For Example, annual household consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 additional taka borrowed by women from these credit programs, compared with 11 taka for men.

A model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition, labor-market productivity, health heterogeneity, and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy. Empirical results, based on a sample of households from Bangladesh, indicate that, despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption, households are averse to inequality. Furthermore, consistent with the model, the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status.

Abstract We exploit recent molecular genetics evidence on the genetic basis of arsenic excretion and unique information on family links among respondents living in different environments from a large panel survey to uncover the hidden costs of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh. We provide for the first time estimates of the effects of the ingestion and retention of inorganic arsenic on direct measures of cognitive and physical capabilities as well as on the schooling attainment, occupational structure, entrepreneurship, and incomes of the rural Bangladesh population. We also provide new estimates of the effects of the consumption of foods grown and cooked in arsenic-contaminated water on individual arsenic concentrations. The estimates are based on arsenic biomarkers obtained from a sample of members of rural households in Bangladesh who are participants in a long-term panel survey following respondents and their coresident household members over a period of 26 years.

We use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments. These include the higher return to and level of schooling, the small effect of healthiness on wages, and the large effect of healthiness on schooling for females relative to males. The model incorporates gender differences in the level and responsiveness of brawn to nutrition in a Roy-economy setting in which activities reward skill and brawn differentially. Empirical evidence from rural Bangladesh provides support for the model and the importance of the distribution of brawn.