Mothers who work may not have enough time to adequately breast-feed or prepare nutritious foods for their young children, or use public services designed to improve child nutrition. The authors quantify the effects of maternal labor supply and mothers' market labor force participation upon child nutrition using survey data from Conakry, Guinea, and child height, standardized for age and sex, as the indicator of nutritional status. 17% of children under age 5 years in Conakry are chronically malnourished. The conceptual framework and empirical strategy are described, followed by an examination of the data and construction of the labor supply and income measures. Analysis of the data found that additional time devoted by the mother to market work is associated with reductions in height-for-age of children under age 5 years. However, increases in mothers' labor income lead to greater child height. Deleterious impacts of mother's time in market work, controlling for income, were found for both self-employment and wage employment, despite differences in conditions of work and the feasibility of combining child and market-oriented activities. Furthermore, additions to maternal labor income yield larger increases in child height than do equivalent additions to other non-mother household income. It follows that income is not completely pooled within households and preferences differ among family members over the allocation of resources to child health-related goods and services and other uses. Despite the large estimated benefits of maternal income, maternal work overall does not appear to improve child nutrition.

中文翻译：

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西非孕产妇劳动力供应和儿童营养


工作的母亲可能没有足够的时间为年幼的孩子进行充分的母乳喂养或准备营养食品，或使用旨在改善儿童营养的公共服务。作者使用几内亚科纳克里的调查数据以及按年龄和性别标准化的儿童身高作为营养状况指标，量化了孕产妇劳动力供应和母亲市场劳动力参与对儿童营养的影响。科纳克里 17% 的 5 岁以下儿童长期营养不良。描述了概念框架和实证策略，然后检查了数据并构建了劳动力供给和收入衡量标准。数据分析发现，母亲投入市场工作的额外时间与 5 岁以下儿童的年龄身高降低有关。然而，母亲劳动收入的增加导致孩子身高更高。研究发现，在控制收入的情况下，母亲从事市场工作的时间对自营职业和工资就业都产生了有害影响，尽管工作条件存在差异，而且将儿童与市场导向的活动结合起来的可行性也不同。此外，母亲劳动收入的增加比其他非母亲家庭收入的同等增加对儿童身高的增加更大。由此可见，收入并未完全集中在家庭内部，家庭成员对儿童健康相关商品和服务以及其他用途的资源分配偏好也不同。尽管孕产妇收入估计带来巨大好处，但总体而言，孕产妇工作似乎并没有改善儿童营养。