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Determinants of height and biological inequality in Mediterranean Spain, 1859–1967 [1]

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Date: 2014-12-01

For nearly three decades, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert W. Fogel and a group of colleagues, working at the present time, have investigated how the size and shape of the human body help to explain social and economic changes throughout history (Fogel, 1994, Komlos, 2009, Steckel, 2009, Floud et al., 2011). Their research has given rise not only to a new field of study but also to the hypothesis that physical height is an indicator of the level of health of human populations throughout the course of history (Komlos and Baten, 2004, Steckel, 2008, Komlos, 2009). Thus, the study of height, together with other well-known indicators such as the rates of infant mortality and of life expectancy, has been employed to measure levels of biological well-being from a historical perspective in different parts of the world (Komlos and Baten, 1998, Salvatore et al., 2010, Floud et al., 2011, Mironov, 2012).

In the last decade, the focus of much anthropometric research has shifted to the determinants of height and the influence that inequality has on biological well-being (Silventoinen, 2003, Guntupalli and Baten, 2006, Akachi and Canning, 2007, López-Alonso, 2007, Steckel, 2009, Schoch et al., 2012, Hatton, 2013, Blum, 2013a, Blum, 2013b). Nevertheless, there are as yet few long-term studies that analyze the determinants and the influence of inequality on height during the 19th and 20th centuries, characterized by structural changes in living standards and patterns of physical growth. Accordingly, the objective of the present study is to analyze the determinants of stature in Mediterranean Spain during the ten-decade period 1860–1960 and likewise the influence that socioeconomic inequality had on biological well-being in different environmental contexts and their variations over time. To do this, we examine the height data of military conscripts in Valencia who belonged to the birth cohorts spanning the years 1859–1967.1 In Spain, the process of economic modernization spanned the years 1850–2000; Valencia, located in the center of the Mediterranean Spain, was one of the first regions to undergo this process.

The anthropometric sample, composed of 82,039 heights, is derived from nine Valencian municipalities that differed from one another in regard to their environmental conditions and economic profiles. Unlike most studies based on military-conscript data from other countries, ours is spared the problem of skewing due to selection biases, notably the minimum-height requirement (Puche-Gil, 2009, Puche-Gil, 2011). This is because throughout the entire period of compulsory military service in Spain, from the mid-19th to the late 20th century, all young Spanish men, upon reaching the age of conscription, were obliged to undergo a physical examination to determine whether or not they qualified for military service, and the data of those who were disqualified have been preserved along with the others. We thus have a considerable advantage over researchers using military-conscription data from countries other than Spain, based as they are, in many cases, on samples of subpopulations, such as volunteer soldiers, recruits, and slaves (Komlos, 2004).

This study provides new evidence regarding the influence at the individual level of socioeconomic status and of the environmental context upon biological well-being of Spanish populations in the different phases of modern economic growth. The results complement those of Quiroga and Coll (2000), Costa-Font and Gil (2008) and María-Dolores and Martínez-Carrión (2011), which analyze, respectively, the height inequality as a proxy for income inequality, influence of socio-environmental factors on both adult height and gender dimorphism (the height gap), and the relationship between height and various indicators of economic development in Spain from 1850 to 1958, from a macro perspective.

While there exist anthropometric studies of Mexico (López-Alonso, 2012) and Switzerland (Schoch et al., 2012) and at least one that provides an international perspective (Blum, 2013a), this study provides a qualitative leap for various reasons: the volume and quality of the information managed and the length of the study period, while the independent variables include some which are infrequent in other studies.

The rest of the study consists of five sections. In Section 2, we analyze the characteristics of the study region. In Section 3 we describe the characteristics of the anthropometric sample, the individual variables employed, and the econometric methodology applied. In Section 4 we present and analyze the results achieved in the regression models. In the fifth and last section we offer our conclusions.

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[1] Url: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X14000677

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