Dean Spears, Centre for Development Economics

Since the 1980s, average calorie consumption in India has declined by about 200 calories per person per day. This large change has remained a puzzle in the economics literature. Could improvements in the disease environment account for part of this calorie decline? A diminished burden of infectious disease could reduce calorie needs by increasing absorption and eective use of calories that would otherwise be lost to malabsorption or diarrhea, or consumed ghting disease. We employ three comple-mentary empirical strategies to document a robust eect of the disease environment on calorie consumption. In particular, Indian districts where infant mortality declined by more from the 1980s to the 2000s experienced larger declines in calorie consumption, on average. This eect cannot be attributed to work requirements, and is also reected in adult women’s body mass. Improvements in the disease environment could statistically account for about one-quarter or more of the Indian calorie decline.