| Along with the rural-urban migration in China,numerous children in migrant worker's families are left behind in rural area,and they attracted raising concern from the society.Current literatures have investigated the impact of parents' migration on children's living condition,education,and psychology,while the nutritional status is unfortunately ignored.This study adopted the recent four waves(2004,2006,2009,2011)of China Health and Nutrition Survey(CHNS)data to analyze the nutritional status of left-behind children in rural China.Meanwhile,using a Propensity Score Matching and Difference-in-Difference(PSM-DID)method,the average treatment effect(ATT)of the nutritional intake of left-behind children is also estimated.Furthermore,the overall effect of parents,migration on children's nutritional intake is decomposed into income effect and ignorance effect.The former refers to improvement in nutritional status due to income increase from remittance,and the latter refers to deteriorate in nutritional status caused by lack of parental care on the children's nutrition.Income effect is estimated based on income change in migrant family and income elasticity of nutrients calculated by direct estimation method.Ignorance effect is defined as the difference between overall effect(ATT)and income effect.Results showed that all rural children,particularly left-behind children with both parents migrated to urban area,had deficient intake of most nutrients.In addition,the left-behind children's nutritional status was significantly affected by the off-farm employment of father or both parents.We also find that the income elasticities of most nutrients for left-behind children are very small.Consequently,income growth only has limited impact on their nutritional status,and the overall effect is dominated by the ignorance effect.The strong negative ignorance effect is also confirmed by the lower nutritional intake of migrant families compared with non-migrant families.In order to test the robustness of our findings,we also conduct two sensitivity analyses.The first one re-estimates the results using age-specific subsamples,and the second one modifies the definition of left-behind children.The main results keep consistent,indicating our finding is robust.Our study indicates that parents' migration has negative impact on left-behind children's nutrition status,which could be attributed to the lack of parental care in preparing food.A more direct approach to improve left-behind children's nutritional status is promoting dietary and nutritional education in rural region,particular for old people who are taking care of left-behind children. |
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