LABOR AND WOMENS NUTRITION - THE IMPACT OF WORK EFFORT AND FERTILITY ON NUTRITIONAL-STATUS IN GHANA

Economic approaches to nutrition have focused largely on measures of c hild nutrition and thus have been able to ignore the issue of individu al heterogeneity in energy expenditures. Ignoring such an issue may be bad science, however, especially given the case of adults, whose waki ng hours are devoted mostly to labor activities, the energy costs of w hich vary enormously. An instrumental variables technique was employed to obtain consistent estimates of the structural parameters of the nu trition production function for adult women in Ghana. Energy expenditu re, as embodied in individual time allocations over the previous seven days, was found to be an important determinant of female nutritional status, with time devoted to agricultural tasks, in particular, having a strong negative effect. Perhaps most importantly, evidence was foun d of a substantial downward bias of the calorie elasticity estimate wh en the energy expenditure proxies were excluded.