Scientifically, it has been proved that breast milk is the perfect food for the infant during the first six months of life. It contains all the nutrients and immunological factors an infant requires to maintain optimal health and growth. Furthermore, breast milk also protects infants against the two leading causes of infant mortality, upper respiratory infections and diarrhea [1]. However, at the age of six months and above when the child’s birth weight is expected to have doubled, breast milk is no longer sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of the growing infant. Nutritious complementary foods are therefore introduced - also known as weaning foods - which typically covers the period from six to twenty four months of age in most developing countries [2].
On the other hand, nowadays, due to the reduced consumption of breast milk, important nutrients such as proteins, zinc, iron and B-vitamins are likely to be deficient in the contemporary diet of the affected infants [3]. If this development is not well handled during this crucial growth period, it can then lead to under-nutrition. For instance, the first Nigeria Nutrition Network of 2002 [4] identified poor feeding practices and/or shortfall in food intake, as the most important direct factors responsible for malnutrition and illness amongst children in Nigeria.
Starting with the seminal contributions of Bernanke and Gertler (1989) and Kiyotaki and Moore (1997), a large theoretical literature in macroeconomics has studied the implications of credit market imperfections for investment and output dynamics. At the heart of this literature is the inverse relationship between firms’ financial assets, or equivalently internal funds, and the agency costs of investment. When asymmetric information or moral hazard problems entail agency costs in lending relationships, firms’ debt capacity is constrained by the level of assets that can be pledged to outside lenders.
An adverse shock that worsen financial conditions may therefore generate a negative spiral, where low profits reduce debt capacity and hence investment, which further reduces profit, amplifying the initial negative shock, and so forth. This amplification mechanism, known as the credit multiplier or the financial accelerator, has been extremely influential in explaining how relatively small and temporary exogenous shocks to the economy may be amplified and become persistent.
The fall of the Soviet Union initiated an era of unparalleled political and economic reform given the breadth, depth and speed of the changes. The shift towards democracy and capitalism entailed greater personal freedom of thought, expression and lifestyles. The dismantling of the command economy allowed competition to flourish, thus improving productivity of the individual as well as the firm. Overall, individual well?being should have been enhanced through increased freedom and economic resources. However, in Russia and many other countries that underwent market reform, the transition was accompanied by economic crisis, which decreased well?being through material hardship and insecurity. Populations that had never dealt with extreme social risk suddenly found themselves unemployed, unpaid or unable to cope with inflation, while lacking a sufficient safety net and watching the “winners” of the transition achieve unprecedented wealth.
Undoubtedly, these complicated transformations greatly influenced demographic decisions, including whether and when a child was desired. Indeed, while the majority of men and women had two children in Russia before 1990, fertility fell to below 1.2 children per woman by the end of the 1990s (Zhakarov and Ivanova 1996). Research on this dramatic decline has shown very little relevance of postponement to the majority of this fertility decline, nor does it appear due to increasing childlessness rates; the decline seems to be due to stopping behavior in which second and higher order births declined (Sobotka 2002).
