Bio:

Anjali Purushotham received her doctoral degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Goettingen, Germany, in 2021. Since then she has worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, University of Goettingen. Her research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of food-systems transformation, nutrition transition, and public health in low- and middle-income countries.

Project summary:

Switching to sustainable production and consumption practices at household-level do not happen without incurring trade-offs in decision-making on production (labor allocation into farm production, livestock production, and off-farm employment) and consumption (what, where, and how much to consume) side. These trade-offs further lead to complex and non-linear pathways through which food-systems transformations affect nutrition and health status. Furthermore, the geographical location of the households brings additional spatial heterogeneities into these non-linear pathways. This project aims to disentangle the non-linear pathways and empirically estimate them using a novel data set on household production, consumption, and health status from the rural-urban interface of Bangalore city, India. Flexible methodological frameworks that allow for non-linearities and polycentric spatial effects will be applied to estimate the pathways between food-systems transformation and nutrition/health. The findings of the project help to understand which pathway or combination of pathways are important for which sub-section of population, particularly in regions facing malnutrition and non-communicable diseases.

Publications:

Purushotham, A., Mittal, N., Ashwini, B.C., Umesh, K.B. von Cramon-Taubadel, S., Vollmer, S. (2022). “A quantile regression analysis of dietary diversity and anthropometric outcomes among children and women in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore, India”. Food Policy 107, p. 102216. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2021.102216.