Measuring Chronic Hunger from Diet Snapshots

John Gibson

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2020, vol. 68, issue 3, 813 - 838

Abstract: To measure hunger and poverty requires studying the lower tail of distributions, which calls for accurate surveying of both means and variances. Surveys often gather data on respondents for only a short period—taking what is here called a “snapshot”—and although these surveys may be adequate for measuring means and totals, they overstate annual variances and the chronic hunger rate. A new method of deriving chronic hunger estimates from snapshot surveys is proposed, which also allows the transient component of hunger to be identified. This method is demonstrated using a household survey from Myanmar that has repeated observations on households during the year. The transient component of hunger is almost one-half of total hunger. Thus if the transient component is not identified, uncorrected snapshot surveys may measure current hunger but overstate the chronic hunger rate by almost 90%. Results for food consumption in Nigeria are also reported to show that the method matters more broadly; these results highlight the potential for measurement error to distort inferences about the importance of transient welfare fluctuations.

Date: 2020
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