Food Insecurity and Rising Food Prices : What Do We Learn from Experiential Measures?
Throughout many countries in the world, the measurement of food security currently includes accounting for the importance of perception and anxiety about meeting basic food needs. Using panel data from Malawi, this paper shows that worrying about f...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/978411526318607170/Food-insecurity-and-rising-food-prices-what-do-we-learn-from-experiential-measures http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29848 |
| Summary: | Throughout many countries in the world,
the measurement of food security currently includes
accounting for the importance of perception and anxiety
about meeting basic food needs. Using panel data from
Malawi, this paper shows that worrying about food security
is linked to self-reports of having experienced food
insecurity, and the analysis provides evidence that rapidly
rising food prices are a source of the anxiety and
experiences of food insecurity. This finding controls for
individual-level fixed effects and changes in the economic
well-being of the individual. A particularly revealing
finding of the importance of accounting for anxiety in
assessing food insecurity is that individuals report a
significant increase in experiences of food insecurity in
the presence of rapidly rising food prices even when dietary
diversity and caloric intake is stable. |
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