Nutrition And Dietary Diversity In East African Pastoralist Households: Mental Accounting, Market Failures And Intrahousehold Allocation

In this thesis I explore the determinants and intrahousehold allocation of nutrition in pastoralist households in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia. Little economic research has been done on pastoralist households, especially on these topics. This work helps to fill that void, while also testing some of the common assumptions made in modeling the relationship between nutrition and income more generally. In Chapter 1 I review some of the literature that provides background or motivation to the questions of this thesis. In Chapter 2, I explore the nutrition-income relationship for pastoralist households in East Africa. Previous estimates of income elasticities of nutritional demand have ranged from zero to close to unity. However, these estimates are always based on nutrition’s relationship with total income. One possible explanation for this wide range is that nutrition may respond differently to different sources of income if, for example, agents engage in “mental accounting”, the practice of treating distinct income sources as not fully fungible. Estimating income-nutrition elasticities with total income may mask these differential responses and result in very different income elasticity estimates depending on which income source changes. I find that differential nutritional responses across income sources do exist among the pastoralist households studied. Possible explanations for this result are market failures for certain commodities, intrahousehold bargaining and mental accounting. Tests show that neither markets failures nor intrahousehold bargaining fully account for the differential responses observed. Thus it appears that mental accounting indeed plays some part in explaining the nutritional patterns evident in this sample. In Chapter 3, I explore intrahousehold nutritional allocation in the pastoralist households studied. A number of previous studies have compared income or price elasticities of resource allocation across demographic cohorts as a way of inferring intrahousehold welfare disparities (or the lack thereof). However, elasticities have very different welfare implications depending on the direction of income or price changes and thus cannot be used to make definitive welfare comparisons. To control for this problem I estimate cohort-specific income elasticities separately for when income is below or above the household’s intertemporal mean income. Statistical tests show that individuals do exhibit asymmetric responses to changes in aboveand below-mean income. Furthermore, I find that household heads appear to disproportionately bear the nutritional burden when household income is below its mean while other household members appear to disproportionately enjoy nutritional gains when household income is above its mean. Stochastic dominance tests on simulated cohort-specific nutritional distributions show that adult daughters are systematically better of than other household members, sons are systematically worse off, and there seems to be little difference between male household heads and their wives. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Kira was born in Austin, Texas in 1979 but grew up in the Chicagoland area. She graduated from Wheaton Warrenville High School in 1997 and University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2002 where she majored in International Relations with an area emphasis on Africa. Kira’s parents, John and Carol Johnstone, are both highenergy physicists and work at Fermi International Laboratory in Batavia, IL. She also has two little brothers, David and Ian, who are 19 and 15 years old, respectively. Kira is often affectionately referred to as the “accident in grad school” while her brothers are the “permanent position kids. ” She also has a foster brother Skylar, who is 20, and an adopted older brother Jim, who is 32. Jim was a childhood friend who was officially and legally adopted into the Johnstone clan when he and Kira were both in high school. In 2004 Kira married Gary Villa and in 2005 they had their first son, Aidan. From ages 7 to 27 Kira had a cat, Fraidy. This cat was Kira’s companion from before her first boyfriend to after her first child was born. For more than ten years Kira played clarinet and piano. In her youth she often dreamed of one day being in the New York Philharmonic. However as she grew older, the voice of her social conscience grew louder and her love of music began to take a back seat to her love for the poor and hungry in the world. Thus upon entering university Kira joined Wisconsin Public Research Interest Group (WISPIRG) where she worked on issues on hunger and homelessness and the environment. During the first few years of university Kira worked as a volunteer, intern, field manager and canvass director for WISPIRG. In her junior year at UW-Madison, Kira participated in a year-long study abroad program to Kenya known as Minnesota Studies in International Development (MSID).