Should Spain implement the universal school lunch?

In a new article in The Conversation, SOFI-researcher José Montalbán Castilla discusses effects of having free school lunch for children. How does the students’ academic career, health and work life benefit from having free school lunches early in life? José Montalbán Castilla summarizes the different school lunch systems across the world, and highlights evidence from Sweden.

 

Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University and Lund University earlier this year published a study in the journal Review of Economic Studies (Lundborg, Rooth and Petersen, 2022), in which they found high returns of the Swedish universal school lunch system. They find that the program has an impact of increasing the income with 3% for students who benefited from the program, affecting more positively to those students whose parents were low-income.

In the article José Montalbán Castilla look at the case of Spain, where he make a simple cost-benefit analysis and recommends to implement the universal school lunch in Spain.

Read the article in The Conversation, published September 14, 2022, in Spanish.
 

Read more about the study on school lunches in Sweden:

Petter Lundborg, Dan-Olof Rooth, Jesper Alex-Petersen, Long-Term Effects of Childhood Nutrition: Evidence from a School Lunch Reform, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 89, Issue 2, March 2022, Pages 876–908,