Are some developing countries caught in a hunger trap?

Aicha Lucie Sanou
Additional contact information
Aicha Lucie Sanou: LEO - Laboratoire d'Économie d'Orleans [2022-...] - UO - Université d'Orléans - UT - Université de Tours - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper aims to test the existence of an unconditional hunger trap and to determine whether biofuel production is among the key long-term determinants of food insecurity. Therefore, we consider the Markov transition matrix and ergodic distribution to test the hypothesis of an unconditional hunger trap and then the conditional inference regression tree to identify the key drivers of food insecurity. We find that developing countries are not caught in a hunger trap. The result of the transition matrix shows that all countries with high levels of food insecurity can move to a lower level. Furthermore, given the characteristics of the countries, the conditional inference regression tree results show that the most important variable is gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. However, in addition to this variable, we need to include the level of age dependency ratio, precipitation, socioeconomic conditions, and corruption index for countries with high levels of food insecurity. Considering the overall sample and sub-samples of low and high food insecure countries, biofuel production is not part of the long-term determinants. The results of the boosting model and panel data quantile regression reveal that the influence of biofuels seems very weak, meaning that they can be a way to fight climate change without penalizing food security.

Date: 2024-09-27
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://univ-orleans.hal.science/hal-04446542v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://univ-orleans.hal.science/hal-04446542v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-04446542

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10634949

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().