wasting.<sup>18</sup> For the average beneficiary child there may only have been a limited improvement in nutrition status, but for the most disadvantaged there was a marked improvement.<sup>19</sup> _Direct Expenditure and Consumption Effects_ A channel through which the cash transfer may have improved child anthropometry is through an increase in the consumption of food goods associated with increases in child heightfor-age. We look for evidence of this in two ways, first with respect to reported spending patterns of various food goods and, second, with the reported food intake of young children. Table 1B reports the program impacts on the household food budget share in column 1 and, in columns 3 to 5, the impacts on consumption of a selected number of individual food goods by children younger than age 60 months, based on parents’ recall over the week before the survey.<sup>20</sup> In beneficiary households, the cash transfer increases available resources. Indeed, we find that the total food share of the household budget declines almost three percentage points, indicating that households are moving along the food Engle curve, as would be predicted after a gain in income. Among beneficiary children in _Pantawid_ villages, there was an 8.2 percentage point increase in parents feeding their children (ages 6 to 60 months) eggs and a 6.9 percentage point increase in dairy as well as some indication of greater frequency of meat and fish consumption (although not precisely estimated) during the previous week compared with children in nonprogram villages. We show in Appendix Table 7 that saturation dampens the gains to beneficiary children’s anthropometry in treated villages.

> 18 Stunting is measured as height-for-age < -2 standard deviations (SD), and severe stunting is measured as heightfor-age < -3 SD, applying the World Health Organization (WHO) Child Growth Standard (WHO 2006). Analogously, wasting is measured as weight-for-age < -2 SD and severe wasting as weight-for-age < -3 SD, applying the same WHO Child Growth Standard.

> 19 de Hoop et al. (2019) document education impacts of _Pantawid_ and show that similar to findings from other CCT programs, the schooling behavior of age-appropriate children improves 4 percentage points for enrollment and 2 to 3 percentage points in attendance, depending on the age group analyzed. These improvements are apparent despite an already high level of enrollment and attendance in comparison communities.

> 20 Protein-rich foods such as eggs, meat, fish, and dairy are particularly important for the linear growth of young children (Baten and Blum 2014; Moradi 2010). Appendix Table 6 shows that the young Filipino children in our control communities eat a diet besides rice, which is almost universally eaten, consisting mainly of eggs, fish, green vegetables, and bananas. (We did not ask about rice consumption of young children, but the Philippine national nutrition survey confirms that virtually all Filipino children eat rice every day (Denney et al. 2018).) The chief sources of protein, then, are eggs, fish, and some meat with little dairy or legumes consumed. These patterns are similar to infant and young child feeding practices reported by Denney et al. (2018) using the Philippine national nutrition survey, suggesting that the children in the _Pantawid_ survey are comparable to the average Filipino child in as far as eggs and fish are the most important protein sources for them.

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