The Effect Of New Rural Cooperative Medical System On Nutrient Intakes Of Rural Children

In recent years,the topic of resource allocation within family become popular around the world.Many domestic and foreign researches have confirmed that that the gender differences happened in many areas,including the allocation of education,healthcare and asset resources.According to the 2010 survey of National Development Research Fund,rural children is still facing the problem of "Poor Nutrition".As the sexual difference is extensively exist in rural area,rural children in different gender may receive different food resource.For now,relative research based on gender resource is not enough,thus analyzing gender difference in family nutrition allocation will supplement the research,increase social concern on girl's nutrition and provide some suggestion to the government to nutrition subsidy policy.In the research of inner family nutrition allocation,income and nutrition consumption reflect strong endogenous problem.According to precautionary saving theory,new rural cooperative medical system can provide guarantee to the family when it encounter severe disease in the future,thus it can promote family to decrease current saving and increase consumption.Existing researches have verified positive effect of new rural cooperative medical system on rural family,this paper based on Oster's non-monotone hypothesis and precaution saving theory and use the CHNS data to make descriptive analysis and empirical analysis of gender difference in family nutrition allocation.Descriptive analysis use double difference method to reflect change of gender difference before and after the implement of new rural cooperative medical insurance.The result of descriptive analysis shows that gender difference of calorie,carbohydrate and protein consumption increased while fat consumption difference is not obvious.The result of empirical research shows that the new rural cooperative medical system can improved rural children's four kinds nutrition consumption.However,the boys' nutrient consumption improves more than that of the girls when the expected income increased.In other words,female children and teenagers are staying in relative low position of the family.Besides,families with female householder and higher educated householder show smaller nutritional gender difference.For this phenomenon,administrative departments and institutions should reinforce the gender equivalence education in rural area,improve human resource input for rural female,improve the nutrition meal subsidy program in rural school and gradually improve the nutrition consumption of rural girls.