Globalization and the Benefits of Education: Evidence From the Double Burden of Malnutrition

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how rising women's education and exposure to economic and social globalization jointly shape the Double Burden of Malnutrition (DBM), defined as the coexistence of maternal overweight and child stunting within the same household. Drawing on Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) spanning 1992–2017 across 38 low‐ and middle‐income countries, we first apply a sub‐national (DHS region) bivariate statistical decomposition framework that teases apart two forces: “structure effects”, which capture changes in how household characteristics relate to DBM while holding their distribution fixed, and “composition effects”, which isolate how shifts in the distribution of household characteristics affect DBM while holding their association with DBM constant. In a second‐stage analysis, structure effects show that as social globalization deepens, the protective role of women's education against DBM is attenuated and becomes positively associated with DBM, especially in more urbanized regions. Composition effects further reveal that where economic globalization is already advanced, gains in women's education are associated with higher DBM prevalence. Taken together, this empirical evidence suggests that women's education alone may be insufficient to counteract the nutritional risks linked to globalization, underscoring the need for complementary institutional, regulatory, and dietary interventions.