Measurement and Estimation of Nutritional Deficit among Children in Developing Countries: An Extension of Mora’s Method Using Skew Normal Distribution

Tapan Kumar Chakrabarty, North-Eastern Hill University

The World Health Organization (WHO) classification scheme for the degree of prevalence of malnutrition in a population suggests using anthropometric Z-scores with a cut off value of -2 to see the percentage of subjects belonging to the study population lying two standard deviations below the reference median and quantify the prevalence using this percentage. Although anthropometric indicators are widely used for assessing the nutritional status of children, lack of consensus on standardized growth reference and the choice of cut-off points for prevalence estimates have restricted the use of such measures particularly in the developing countries. Towards this goal, the present article proposes an extension of Mora’s method (Mora, 1989) to estimate nutritional deficit using skew normal distribution for the distributions of the Z-scores of the observed populations. The application of the proposed method is illustrated for the selected states/regions from three countries, India, Bangladesh and Nepal using latest NFHS/DHS survey data.