Harris-Fry, H; Cortina-Borja, M; (2025) Health, wealth, or equity? Trade-offs from households’ allocative decisions. Journal of Development Economics , 177 , Article 103560. 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2025.103560.

Text Cortina Borja_JDE_harrisfry_revision.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 20 June 2026. Download (1MB)

Abstract

Households’ allocative decisions have potentially large implications for the health and welfare of their members. We analyze a dataset of rural Bangladeshi households to estimate: (i) a benchmark level of nutritional adequacy that households could afford by selecting different foods and reallocating them among members, and (ii) the associated trade-offs in terms of income and equity preferences. Using a novel set of non-linear health production functions, we show that households can afford adequate diets that meet the clinical needs of nearly all nutrients. Micronutrient adequacy is primarily achieved by changing household-level food choices, while caloric adequacy depends more on intra-household food allocation. We further show that households do not face a clear health-income trade-off. Instead, we find a degree of inequality aversion (for energy) and inequality preference (for micronutrients) that leads to intra-household allocations that are not fully efficient from the perspective of the production of health.

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