This height data set, constructed from Indonesian military data, Indonesia Family Life Surveys (IFLS) and a sample of Europeans born in Indonesia who joined the Royal Dutch Indies Army (KNIL), was constructed to generate a trend of heights in Java and the Outer Provinces throughout the twentieth century. The data set contains information about education, ethnicity, occupation, height, place of birth, place of last residence, migration and religion.
The study of heights provides a promising approach to a better understanding of the biological welfare of countries and regions for which conventional economic data are relatively sparse. More concretely, the research based on this data set employs a set of socioeconomic variables to explain economic status, using height as a proxy, in an attempt to gauge the effect of changing political and social structure on economic mobility in Indonesian society before and after Independence. Since a person’s height is determined by health during the first years after birth, it is fundamentally an indicator of parents’ welfare; as such, it is more a cause than a consequence of socioeconomic position. Yet, height can also serve as a proxy for the welfare of sons, permitting findings to be interpreted as socioeconomic factors affecting well-being. The upshot is that religion, birthplace, ethnicity, education, and occupation all affect height development, and thus human well-being.
Articles in which the theoretical background of this study, a detailed discussion of the data and research results can be found are the following:
- Bas van Leeuwen and Peter Foldvari, 'Economic Mobility in a Colonial and Postcolonial Economy: Indonesia', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 47 (2) 2016, pp. 171-191.
- Péter Földvári, József Gáll, Daan Marks, and Bas van Leeuwen, 'Indonesia’s regional welfare development, 1900-1990: new anthropometric evidence ,' Economics & Human Biology , Vol. 11 (1) 2013, pp. 78-89.
The Excel-file in this data package contains both the codebook (first worksheet) and the data (second worksheet) of the data set.
