The paper seeks to shed light on the impact of nutrition on schooling outcomes in Colombia. This being said, the authors suggest that welfare programs in Colombia have focused on reducing malnutrition and hunger and increasing school attendance. However, there is not much evidence on the relationship between nutrition status and schooling outcomes in the country. Thereby, the paper analyzes the linkage between both variables, henceforth suggesting that anemic children have a higher probability of delivering average schooling performance. In order to assess these claims, the researchers introduce data provided by the National Survey of Nutritional Status in Colombia and the Demographic and Health Survey.

The paper is structured as follows. After a brief introduction, section one discusses the literature available on nutrition and its impact on education and economic growth, whereas section two describes the database introduced by the authors. Meanwhile, chapter three lays out the empirical strategy used in the investigation, whilst section four presents the main results. Finally, section five presents some robustness checks, whereas section six delivers some concluding arguments.

The document concludes that the results provide valuable evidence on the incidence of nutrition on schooling outcomes. Thereby, it is worth noting that according to the findings made, anemia appears to have no discernable impact on school attendance, but on students’ academic performance.

The document is available in English