Adult height across countries — including India — is not increasing; rather it has remained stagnant or has declined over decades. Should it raise an alarm? Many development experts feel so. It is not just a health marker but also being used to measure overall development. This comes as a surprise given the general perception that humans have been gaining height with broad progress in access to better health care and also to food.
Height is a definitive indicator of good health or healthy growth. The World Bank Group’s latest “Building Human Capital — Where it Matters” report has revealed this reversal in trends. The Bank’s report has assessed the state of human capital in the world, which it defines as “people’s health, skills, and knowledge”. The assessment has analysed the other two components — skills and knowledge — of human capital along with health, using the proxy of adult height. Building human capital starts with the first five years of a child that lays the foundation for a healthy and learning existence. After this, education sets the population on a path to get skills till 20 years; and by the age of 25 years, the workforce deploys this skill to take up livelihood, deciding on their future of employment and readying for their own family.
“Human capital accumulation has stagnated in many low- and middle-income countries (India belongs to this group),” the Bank’s assessment says. Poorer countries have worse human capital accumulation in comparison to past decades. The wide disparity between poor and rich countries has been attributed to the level of human capital accumulation. “Human capital accounts for a substantial share of cross-country income differences: roughly two-thirds of the difference in per capita GDP between rich and poor countries is accounted for by differences in human capital,” as per this assessment.
Citing health as a critical dimension of human capital, the assessment says that the difference between poor and rich countries on this measure is glaring and indicates this would, in the future, negatively impact accumulation of human capital among earlier countries. For gauging growth in average height, the assessment examined height of adults born in 1966 and 1996. Those who reside in upper-middle- and high-income countries have become taller while those in low- and lower-middle-income countries are shorter now than an adult 30 years ago. “…average adult height—a widely used proxy for latent health—rose by about 1 centimetre per decade in Western Europe during the twentieth century and at a similar pace in China in recent decades, but, in several Sub-Saharan African countries, adults are shorter today than they were 25 years ago, indicating a deterioration in underlying health.” The Bank’s report makes a precise measurement: “An adult of Sub-Saharan Africa born in 1996 is 3 centimetres shorter than the average adult born in 1966.” The average adult height for Indians born in 1966 and 1996 remains the same, or is slightly on the decline. This is similar to many low- and lower-middle income countries.
In 2023, the Bank in a first-of-its-kind analysis measured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human capital. It said then, “The pandemic may have led to a clear-cut collapse in human capital.” That year, the world had 2.6 billion people below the age of 20 years, the nursery population for the working force. This population was in a stage of their life that is called ‘building the architecture of their future’: Going to schools to acquire education, getting vaccinated for many diseases to remain healthy and acquiring skills necessary for pursuing livelihood. Between then and now, the two assessments of human capital accumulation point to a great human capital loss gripping the world’s working class.