Among the more important factors our results are conditioned on include household economic status (measured by the stock of wealth as well as flow of expenditures), mother’s education level, region of residence, child care practices such as breastfeeding, and epidemiological factors, particularly as they related to quality of drinking water and sanitation facilities.

A notable exception to this general conclusion above is the case of Pakistan where food security – at least the dimensions that we are able to capture with our indicators – appears to have a substantially weaker association with nutritional status. This result in some ways resonates with the conventional wisdom in Pakistan that epidemiological factors have a greater sway in explaining the variations in child nutritional outcomes in comparison to food related factors. While existing studies have mainly looked at food availability dimensions (daily per capita calories) and self-perception of food insecurity, we confirm this for a broader set of food security indicators.<sup>16</sup> This is a useful caveat for any generalizing statements we may make about the strength of links between food security and nutritional security based on our results. While food security is never sufficient to ensure nutrition security, in the case of Pakistan it appears that, at least statistically, other factors are perhaps of a higher order of importance. This could be because of particularly low attainment levels in these other areas.

But what does this imply for the expected efficacy of food security enhancing interventions in, say, the agriculture sector, to improve child nutrition? Should we have limited expectations? Not necessarily. Agriculture can affect nutrition through several channels. The quality and quantity of food intake is one of them and the one we have focused on exclusively in this report. But agriculture remains the primary economic activity of the majority of the world’s poor and as such, it is intimately linked to incomes of the poor. A majority of the world’s malnourished children also live in agricultural households. So any intervention that gives a meaningful boost to agricultural incomes will inevitably end up affecting nutritional status, if not through food intake, then by enhancing households’ capabilities to access better health services. In addition, specifically targeted agricultural interventions may also lead to women’s empowerment which is again known to affect child nutrition (World Bank, 2012).

The second conclusion we draw from this exercise is that simple indicators such as the food consumption score or the dietary diversity score perform at least as well, if not better than indicators of household food security derived out of richer, more expensive, and time-consuming surveys. The notion of performance here is based on nutritional relevance or the strength of underlying signals on nutritional status, which is important from the point of view of monitoring as well as targeting of interventions attempting to bolster nutrition security.

In Table 11 below we present a ranking of each of these indicators based on how well they correlate with height-for-age z-score under the two empirical regimes of a limited set of mostly 29