Regional Disparity in the Body Mass Index Distribution of Indonesians: New Evidence Beyond The Mean

This article studies the differentials in body mass index (BMI) across the distribution of Indonesian people in urban and rural regions, using the latest wave of the Indonesia Family Life Survey. Besides the mean difference decomposition, this study implements a quantile decomposition analysis and decomposes the differentials between rural and urban populations at various quantile points of the distributions. This study offers new evidence of the substantial heterogeneity of their determinants and their impacts across the distribution, which has been overlooked in the literature. Physical activities explain the distributional differentials across the distribution for men and women, and their relative contribution sizes are larger at the higher quantiles. The significance of the structural effect of food expenditure and choices is observed at the middle and higher quantile points of the female distribution. This article shows the importance of analysing distributional differences by elucidating the heterogeneity of the effects of determinants.