subcomponents of any one of these clusters, say for example, food security alone, cannot substitute for inadequate levels of access to the other clusters or individual components of these clusters.

For an accelerated progress towards reducing child malnutrition what is required is a more complete and detailed knowledge of the extent to which there are gaps in access to adequate levels in each of the clusters of underlying determinants. In contexts where child malnutrition is prevalent, a detailed profile of communities or districts or even countries in terms of whether there is adequate or inadequate access to each of the subcomponents of food security, environment, health and child care, can provide a solid basis for the identification of potential binding constraints impeding progress towards reducing child malnutrition. This exercise may also facilitate the prioritization among interventions in the event that limited financial resources or capacity on the ground, do not permit simultaneous improvements in all of the critical factors of child malnutrition.

In spite of the fundamental role of interactions among the three pillars of (i) food security, (ii) environment and health, and (iii) child care, there is a paucity of evidence on the extent to which there is adequate or inadequate access to one or more of these three pillars.<sup>**2**</sup> To a large extent the lacuna of such evidence, may be attributed to the relative scarcity of nationally representative data sets with all the necessary detailed information (in the same survey) on child nutrition, and all the variables that could capture in a satisfactory manner the different dimensions of food security, environment and health and care practices. Until now, there has been no systematic effort at documenting the gaps in the necessary data. The most commonly used sources of data such as the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) or the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), for historic or budgetary reasons collect data for some key variables such as child care and environment and health without much useful information collected on food security. These surveys are characterized by a strong path dependence, in the sense that the original surveys collected information about specific components of one or two of the three pillars mentioned above with the additional questions added over time constrained by the “straight jacket” of maintaining compatibility with the earlier surveys. In contrast, other specialized surveys ended up collecting information on different dimensions of food security but no information at all child nutrition and anthropometric measures, or on child care or health and environment.<sup>3</sup> With these considerations in mind, this report contributes to the existing literature in three ways. First, it provides one of the first comprehensive investigations of the data availability and data constraints associated with a more systematic application of the UNICEF conceptual framework emphasizing the interrelationship among access to adequate food security, environment and health, and child care practices in the prevalence of malnutrition rates among children in developing countries. Using detailed demographic and health survey data are used from Bangladesh, Bolivia,

> 2 Notable exceptions are Chong et al. (2003) and Alderman et al (2003).

> 3 Interestingly the empirical literature on the determinants of child health does not appear to be affected much by the scarcity of relevant data on the determinants of child malnutrition. The practice prevalent in the majority of studies is to focus the analysis on the contribution of a few key variables on child nutritional outcomes. Examples, of such variables include the economic status of the household, measured by income, consumption expenditures, or household assets (Behrman and Deolalikar, 1987), and the level of education of the mother of the child (Barrera, 1990; Behrman and Wolfe, 1984; Skoufias, 1999; Webb and Block, 2004). In many studies village‐level (or sometimes household‐level) fixed effects are used to control for the potential influence of unobserved or unmeasured factors such as the environmental health and the care practices. Unfortunately, from the perspective of learning about the interactions among these factors this is tantamount to “throwing out the baby with the bathwater" (Bell and Jones, 2012; Beck and Katz, 1995, 2001).

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