Not Free but Effective: Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Commercial Product on Child Nutrition in Ghana

In recent years, sales of commercial nutritionally enhanced complementary food are very common land scape in developing countries. However, whether this phenomenon can improve child nutrition or not is ambiguous. This study explore the impact of appearance of new commercial supplementary food product on child nutrition by means of randomized sales experiment. We use definitely new product for impact evaluation of market based approach. Therefore we can evaluate the impact of appearance and prevalence of the commercial product. The results shows there are heterogeneous impact of the product. The consumption of the product has statistically significant and positive impacts on child weight only for initially less-weighted children, but not for initially well-weighted children. Our results show the market based approach is effective way for improvement of child nutrition in Ghana. Acknowledgement