placestats

Child stunting vs. Pupil-teacher ratio

Fades after adjusting for income

Across 144 countries, Child stunting and Pupil-teacher ratio rise and fall together at r = +0.72 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). Comparing only countries with similar income (GDP per person) shrinks it to +0.31, which could easily be chance (q = 0.10, allowing for the many pairs tested, and allowing for countries in the same region being alike). So the first figure mostly shows richer countries differing from poorer ones, not a link between these two things.

Comparing countries across the middle half of child stunting, 5.47% to 23.9% of children under 5, pupil-teacher ratio is worse by 13.6 pupils per teacher at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 5.71 pupils per teacher.

Link before adjusting (r)+0.718p = 4.0e-24 · 144 countries
After adjusting for national income+0.307p = 0.000 · likely range [+0.15, +0.45]
p, allowing for regions0.018standard error 0.095 · 7 regions
Check for luck (q)0.101across 12,497 pairs

How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.

Child stunting · % of children under 5link with income -0.80 · proxy
Pupil-teacher ratio · pupils per teacherlink with income -0.83 · proxy

Both of these rise and fall closely with national income, so a strong link between them before adjusting was close to certain. Read the adjusted figure, not the first one.

“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.

Every country as a dot

Child stunting · % of children under 5 →Pupil-teacher ratio · pupils per teacher →1%55.3%8.8883.4Afghanistan: 42% of children under 5, 48.8 pupils per teacherAngola: 47.7% of children under 5, 50 pupils per teacherAlbania: 7.4% of children under 5, 17.6 pupils per teacherArmenia: 6.2% of children under 5, 15.4 pupils per teacherAzerbaijan: 6.8% of children under 5, 15.4 pupils per teacherBurundi: 55.3% of children under 5, 42.5 pupils per teacherBelgium: 2.6% of children under 5, 11.3 pupils per teacherBenin: 33.2% of children under 5, 39.2 pupils per teacherBurkina Faso: 19.5% of children under 5, 39.7 pupils per teacherBangladesh: 25.1% of children under 5, 30.1 pupils per teacherBulgaria: 5.5% of children under 5, 15.2 pupils per teacherBahrain: 4.6% of children under 5, 11.9 pupils per teacherBosnia and Herzegovina: 7.9% of children under 5, 16.9 pupils per teacherBelarus: 1.1% of children under 5, 19.2 pupils per teacherBelize: 11.7% of children under 5, 19.8 pupils per teacherBolivia: 10.7% of children under 5, 17.8 pupils per teacherBrazil: 8.9% of children under 5, 20.2 pupils per teacherBarbados: 5.8% of children under 5, 14 pupils per teacherBrunei Darussalam: 9.9% of children under 5, 9.9 pupils per teacherBhutan: 17.9% of children under 5, 34.7 pupils per teacherBotswana: 21% of children under 5, 23.7 pupils per teacherCentral African Republic: 38.9% of children under 5, 83.4 pupils per teacherChile: 1.7% of children under 5, 17.8 pupils per teacherChina: 4.5% of children under 5, 16.4 pupils per teacherCote d'Ivoire: 20.3% of children under 5, 41.8 pupils per teacherCameroon: 27.2% of children under 5, 44.8 pupils per teacherCongo, Dem. Rep.: 44.1% of children under 5, 33.2 pupils per teacherCongo, Rep.: 16.3% of children under 5, 44.4 pupils per teacherColombia: 11.6% of children under 5, 23.3 pupils per teacherComoros: 17.4% of children under 5, 28.1 pupils per teacherCabo Verde: 5.3% of children under 5, 21.1 pupils per teacherCosta Rica: 10.6% of children under 5, 12.2 pupils per teacherCzechia: 2.4% of children under 5, 18.9 pupils per teacherGermany: 2.2% of children under 5, 12.3 pupils per teacherDjibouti: 20.9% of children under 5, 29.4 pupils per teacherDominican Republic: 5.6% of children under 5, 18.9 pupils per teacherAlgeria: 8.9% of children under 5, 24.3 pupils per teacherEcuador: 17.7% of children under 5, 24.3 pupils per teacherEgypt, Arab Rep.: 12.9% of children under 5, 23.7 pupils per teacherEstonia: 1.3% of children under 5, 11.3 pupils per teacherEthiopia: 35.5% of children under 5, 55.1 pupils per teacherFinland: 1.7% of children under 5, 13.7 pupils per teacherFiji: 7.2% of children under 5, 28 pupils per teacherGabon: 13.7% of children under 5, 24.5 pupils per teacherUnited Kingdom: 3.5% of children under 5, 15.1 pupils per teacherGeorgia: 4.7% of children under 5, 8.98 pupils per teacherGhana: 15.6% of children under 5, 27 pupils per teacherGuinea: 26.6% of children under 5, 47.1 pupils per teacherGambia, The: 14% of children under 5, 36.1 pupils per teacherGuinea-Bissau: 28.3% of children under 5, 51.9 pupils per teacherEquatorial Guinea: 17.1% of children under 5, 23.2 pupils per teacherGreece: 2% of children under 5, 9.38 pupils per teacherGuatemala: 44.6% of children under 5, 20.3 pupils per teacherGuyana: 7.1% of children under 5, 23.2 pupils per teacherHonduras: 17.9% of children under 5, 25.6 pupils per teacherIndonesia: 22.6% of children under 5, 17 pupils per teacherIndia: 32.9% of children under 5, 32.7 pupils per teacherIreland: 2.2% of children under 5, 16.1 pupils per teacherIran, Islamic Rep.: 4.8% of children under 5, 28.5 pupils per teacherJamaica: 6.9% of children under 5, 24.8 pupils per teacherJordan: 7.7% of children under 5, 18.5 pupils per teacherJapan: 5.2% of children under 5, 15.7 pupils per teacherKazakhstan: 4.4% of children under 5, 17.2 pupils per teacherKenya: 17.9% of children under 5, 30.7 pupils per teacherKyrgyz Republic: 11% of children under 5, 25 pupils per teacherCambodia: 22% of children under 5, 41.7 pupils per teacherKiribati: 14.7% of children under 5, 25.5 pupils per teacherKorea, Rep.: 1.8% of children under 5, 16.3 pupils per teacherKuwait: 4.5% of children under 5, 8.88 pupils per teacherLao PDR: 29.9% of children under 5, 22.3 pupils per teacherLebanon: 10.1% of children under 5, 12.5 pupils per teacherLiberia: 26.9% of children under 5, 22.3 pupils per teacherSt. Lucia: 2.8% of children under 5, 14.7 pupils per teacherSri Lanka: 10.1% of children under 5, 21.7 pupils per teacherLesotho: 35% of children under 5, 32.9 pupils per teacherLithuania: 1.6% of children under 5, 13.5 pupils per teacherLatvia: 1.7% of children under 5, 11.5 pupils per teacherMorocco: 13.7% of children under 5, 26.8 pupils per teacherMoldova: 4.2% of children under 5, 17.9 pupils per teacherMadagascar: 38.4% of children under 5, 39.8 pupils per teacherMaldives: 14.2% of children under 5, 10.2 pupils per teacherMexico: 13.1% of children under 5, 26.6 pupils per teacherNorth Macedonia: 3.8% of children under 5, 14.9 pupils per teacherMali: 23.2% of children under 5, 37.8 pupils per teacherMalta: 3.5% of children under 5, 12.9 pupils per teacherMyanmar: 24.5% of children under 5, 24.4 pupils per teacherMongolia: 7.1% of children under 5, 30.4 pupils per teacherMozambique: 37% of children under 5, 55.3 pupils per teacherMauritania: 21.5% of children under 5, 34.3 pupils per teacherMauritius: 7.8% of children under 5, 16.2 pupils per teacherMalawi: 33.2% of children under 5, 58.7 pupils per teacherMalaysia: 24.3% of children under 5, 11.7 pupils per teacherNamibia: 16.4% of children under 5, 25.1 pupils per teacherNiger: 48.3% of children under 5, 36.3 pupils per teacherNigeria: 33.8% of children under 5, 37.6 pupils per teacherNetherlands: 1.6% of children under 5, 11.8 pupils per teacherNepal: 26% of children under 5, 19.7 pupils per teacherNaoero: 16% of children under 5, 40.2 pupils per teacherOman: 12.9% of children under 5, 9.67 pupils per teacherPakistan: 33.6% of children under 5, 44.1 pupils per teacherPanama: 14% of children under 5, 22 pupils per teacherPeru: 10.6% of children under 5, 17.4 pupils per teacherPhilippines: 27.7% of children under 5, 29.1 pupils per teacherPapua New Guinea: 47.6% of children under 5, 35.5 pupils per teacherPoland: 1% of children under 5, 10.2 pupils per teacherPortugal: 3.2% of children under 5, 12.4 pupils per teacherParaguay: 3.2% of children under 5, 24.2 pupils per teacherWest Bank and Gaza: 8% of children under 5, 24.5 pupils per teacherQatar: 5.4% of children under 5, 12.2 pupils per teacherRomania: 7% of children under 5, 19.3 pupils per teacherRwanda: 29.8% of children under 5, 59.5 pupils per teacherSaudi Arabia: 11.1% of children under 5, 13.8 pupils per teacherSenegal: 17.2% of children under 5, 36.3 pupils per teacherSingapore: 2.8% of children under 5, 14.7 pupils per teacherSolomon Islands: 29.8% of children under 5, 25.4 pupils per teacherSierra Leone: 25.2% of children under 5, 27.5 pupils per teacherEl Salvador: 9.4% of children under 5, 26.9 pupils per teacherSerbia: 4.6% of children under 5, 14.3 pupils per teacherSao Tome and Principe: 10% of children under 5, 31.2 pupils per teacherSuriname: 8% of children under 5, 13.4 pupils per teacherEswatini: 18.9% of children under 5, 26.6 pupils per teacherSeychelles: 6.2% of children under 5, 14.5 pupils per teacherTurks and Caicos Islands: 3.2% of children under 5, 17.7 pupils per teacherChad: 31.5% of children under 5, 56.9 pupils per teacherTogo: 23% of children under 5, 40.1 pupils per teacherThailand: 12.3% of children under 5, 16.6 pupils per teacherTajikistan: 13.1% of children under 5, 22.3 pupils per teacherTimor-Leste: 45.4% of children under 5, 26.9 pupils per teacherTonga: 1.6% of children under 5, 21.6 pupils per teacherTunisia: 8.9% of children under 5, 16.9 pupils per teacherTurkiye: 5.5% of children under 5, 17 pupils per teacherTuvalu: 5.3% of children under 5, 15.6 pupils per teacherTanzania: 29.9% of children under 5, 50.6 pupils per teacherUganda: 23.5% of children under 5, 42.7 pupils per teacherUkraine: 11.7% of children under 5, 13 pupils per teacherUruguay: 6.5% of children under 5, 11 pupils per teacherUnited States: 4.2% of children under 5, 14.2 pupils per teacherUzbekistan: 6.7% of children under 5, 21.5 pupils per teacherViet Nam: 19.2% of children under 5, 20.3 pupils per teacherVanuatu: 31% of children under 5, 26.6 pupils per teacherSamoa: 8.4% of children under 5, 30.2 pupils per teacherSouth Africa: 24.4% of children under 5, 30.3 pupils per teacherZambia: 32.3% of children under 5, 42.1 pupils per teacherZimbabwe: 23.7% of children under 5, 36.4 pupils per teacherAGOBDICAFCOGESTGRCGTMPOLRWATLS

best-fit line line after adjusting

Four ways to measure the link

MethodrpCountries
Standard (Pearson), not adjusted+0.7184.0e-24144
By rank (Spearman), not adjusted+0.7565.7e-28144
Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income+0.3070.000144
By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income+0.2750.001144

The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 144 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: +0.412 (a minus sign means it grew).

How solid is it?

Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from +0.260 (without AGO) to +0.338 (without GTM). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: AGO (-0.047).

Within each region

Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.

nr
East Asia & Pacific24+0.09
Europe & Central Asia30+0.25
Latin America & Caribbean22+0.13
Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan17+0.68
Sub-Saharan Africa44+0.26

By income third

If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.

nr
Poorest third48+0.19
Middle third48+0.45
Richest third48-0.04

By largest religious group

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

nr
Christians81+0.28
Muslims42+0.39

By last european coloniser

Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.

nr
France23+0.03
Never a European colony20+0.41
Spain17+0.04
United Kingdom46+0.44

Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = +0.348 after dropping 5 countries.

Two series, one country

Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.

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Over time, within countries

Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 20years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.

The link shows up within countries over time (r = +0.183) but mostly disappears in year-to-year changes (r = +0.047). That points to slow trends particular to each country, not the two measures moving together from year to year.

Across countries (adjusted)+0.307for comparison
Within countries+0.499each country vs itself
…and vs the same year elsewhere+0.183q = 0.019 · 142 countries
Year-on-year changes+0.047q = 0.174
Read with care.
  • Almost all of this indicator's variation is between countries, not within them, so the within-country estimate rests on a small part of the data.
  • Much of the within-country association disappears once shared global year effects are removed, which points to a common worldwide trend rather than a country-level relationship.

2,054 country-years (one country in one year), 142 countries, 2000–2019, about 15 years each on average. Share of the variation that happens within countries over time: 6% for Child stunting, 6% for Pupil-teacher ratio. The margins of error allow for each country appearing many times, and for each year’s value being close to the year before.

Year-to-year changes are a cautious test, not a final answer. Looking only at changes from one year to the next removes each country’s own trends. But it also makes measurement mistakes louder, which pulls the results toward zero. A near-zero result here is weak evidence of no link, not proof.

With one measure years behind the other

0.20−0.2-100+10years Pupil-teacher ratio trails Child stunting →lag -10: r = -0.094 (n = 2,620)lag -9: r = -0.070 (n = 2,634)lag -8: r = -0.037 (n = 2,651)lag -7: r = 0.002 (n = 2,673)lag -6: r = 0.021 (n = 2,652)lag -5: r = 0.042 (n = 2,552)lag -4: r = 0.070 (n = 2,456)lag -3: r = 0.099 (n = 2,367)lag -2: r = 0.122 (n = 2,284)lag -1: r = 0.155 (n = 2,184)lag +0: r = 0.183 (n = 2,054)lag +1: r = 0.180 (n = 1,942)lag +2: r = 0.192 (n = 1,811)lag +3: r = 0.198 (n = 1,704)lag +4: r = 0.197 (n = 1,589)lag +5: r = 0.193 (n = 1,466)lag +6: r = 0.170 (n = 1,364)lag +7: r = 0.155 (n = 1,258)lag +8: r = 0.130 (n = 1,140)lag +9: r = 0.090 (n = 1,004)lag +10: r = 0.086 (n = 873)

Same year (lag 0): +0.183. A peak away from zero does not show which comes first. These series change slowly — this year’s value is close to last year’s. That makes the curve smooth and nearly symmetric, whatever produced the data. Even a sharp peak at one lag (a gap of some years) would not prove that one measure changes the other.

The data


% of children under 5
pupils per teacher		Years
Burundi BDI55.3%42.52024, 2018
Niger NER48.3%36.32024, 2017
Angola AGO47.7%502024, 2015
Papua New Guinea PNG47.6%35.52024, 2016
Timor-Leste TLS45.4%26.92024, 2018
Guatemala GTM44.6%20.32024, 2018
Congo, Dem. Rep. COD44.1%33.22024, 2015
Afghanistan AFG42%48.82024, 2018
Central African Republic CAF38.9%83.42024, 2016
Madagascar MDG38.4%39.82024, 2018
Mozambique MOZ37%55.32024, 2018
Ethiopia ETH35.5%55.12024, 2011
Lesotho LSO35%32.92024, 2017
Nigeria NGA33.8%37.62024, 2010
Pakistan PAK33.6%44.12024, 2018

World Bank, World Development Indicators
World Bank, World Development Indicators

Sources

Child stunting

Prevalence of stunting, height for age, modelled estimate (% of children under 5)

UNICEF, WHO and World Bank Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates · CC BY 4.0 · updated quarterly

An estimate from a statistical model. The agencies fit a model to household surveys and predict every country and year. So this is smoother than the surveys behind it, and it has values for years nobody measured. The survey-only series never reaches sixty countries in any year.

Pupil-teacher ratio

Pupil-teacher ratio, primary

UNESCO Institute for Statistics · CC BY 4.0 · updated quarterly

The World Bank's copy stops at 2019.

How this was computed

Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2010–2024. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 7 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 12,497 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated DYB 2024. How the country data works · explore Child stunting and Pupil-teacher ratio

This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Child stunting changes Pupil-teacher ratio, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.

More links with Child stunting or Pupil-teacher ratio