The challenge of measuring hunger

Joachim De Weerdt, Kathleen Beegle, Jed Friedman () and John Gibson

No 6736, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for calculating hunger numbers directly from these same surveys. For either approach, embedded in this effort are a number of important details about how household surveys are designed and how these data are then used. Using a survey experiment in Tanzania, this study finds great fragility in hunger counts stemming from alternative survey designs. As a consequence, comparable and valid hunger numbers will be lacking until more effort is made to either harmonize survey designs or better understand the consequences of survey design variation.

Keywords: Labor & Employment Law; Nutrition; Food Security; Energy Demand; Energy and Environment; Energy and Mining; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr and nep-dev
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6736

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