The Biological Standard of Living in South Korea: Educational status has the largest impact on height of KNHANES cohorts born from the 1950s to 1980s.

Abstract

Numerous studies have established a positive association between economic development and physical growth of humans. While South Korea has commonly been credited as the world's fastest growing economy after World War II, multivariate research conducted on the height development of South Koreans remains insufficient, as previous studies were limited to descriptive analysis by exploring broad anthropometric trends. Pooling several waves of the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (KNHANES), heights of men and women were first plotted by sex and birth decade. Heights of men and women increased from about 169 cm to 176 cm and 157 cm to 162 cm, respectively, over the second half of the twentieth century. Next, upon regressing height on basic social, economic, educational and demographic confounding variables contained in the datasets, individuals born in rural districts were found to be significantly shorter by 0.3 to 0.7 cm than their urban counterparts. Yet, residential dummies proxied by administrative provinces did not come out as consistent in the regressions. Expectedly, individuals with a low household income were significantly shorter (by 0.5 to 0.6 cm) than those in the high income group. Most strikingly, individuals with a high education level were 4 to 5 cm taller than those with low education (no or only elementary education). This suggests that educational status has been the most important factor influencing heights of South Koreans. The latter finding has not been given much discussion in the anthropometric literature, which has traditionally focused on gross-nutritional and income indicators as drivers of human growth.