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[A]n important factor is the relatively poor health of young Indian women. More than 90 percent of adolescent Indian girls are anemic, a crucial measure of poor nutrition. And while researchers have long known that Indian mothers tend to be less healthy than their African counterparts, a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that the disparity is far worse than previously believed.

By analyzing census data, Diane Coffey of Princeton University found that 42 percent of Indian mothers are underweight. The figure for sub-Saharan Africa is 16.5 percent.

Ms. Coffey calculated that the average woman in India weighs less at the end of her pregnancy than the average woman in sub-Saharan Africa did at the beginning, an astonishing finding.

“In India, people are richer, better educated and have fewer children than those in sub-Saharan Africa, so it’s really surprising that Indian children are shorter and smaller than those in sub-Saharan Africa,” Ms. Coffey said in an interview. “But when you step back and look at the state of Indian mothers, it’s not such a surprise after all.”

Research has shown that genetics play no role in the size differences, leaving environmental factors as the only explanation, Ms. Coffey said.

The reasons for Indian mothers’ relatively poor health are many, including a culture that discriminates against them. Sex differences in education, employment outside the home, and infant mortality are all greater in India than in Africa.

In early 2012, I wrote a post titled “Speeding Fines that Vary with Income: Absolute vs. Relative Risk Aversion and Public Policy,” about income-proportional speeding tickets.

In light of the best evidence on the relationship between risk preferences and income–which essentially finds that as people get wealthier, they care less and less about gambling over a fixed dollar amount (say, $200), but their aversion to gambling a fixed fraction of their income or wealth (say, 1% of their income)–I explained that instead of fining people a fixed dollar amount for speeding, we should fine them a proportion of their income. In practice, this could be done by using a person’s declared income for the last year by checking with the IRS or with the department of revenue in the state where a person gets fined. In my post, I wrote:

“Milked and Feathered: The Regressive Welfare Effects of Canada’s Supply Management Regime.” That’s the title of a new article (gated, unfortunately) by the University of Manitoba’s Ryan Cardwell and coauthors in Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de politiques.

I recall first hearing about supply management policies in an international trade class I took as an undergraduate at the Université de Montréal. If you are not familiar with supply management, it consists broadly of three policy interventions: