Poverty and Malnutrition at Extremes of South Asian Food Systems

Barbara Harriss Stuart Gillespie Jane Pryer The close empirical association between material poverty (whether of assets or of income) and malnutrition in children has come under scrutiny following counterintuitive evidence. Child nutrition indicators may not be good calibrators for anti-poverty targeting, and vice versa, if such a misfit is widespread. A number of reasons have been advanced to account for relationships of misfit between poverty and malnutrition. All such reasons concern the interpretive significance of indicators and concepts used.