The challenge of measuring hunger through survey

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

No 488089, Working Papers of LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance

Abstract: There is widespread interest in estimating 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 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: hunger prevalence; measurement error; consumption; survey design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in LICOS Discussion paper series 365/2015 , pages 1-37

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/308118 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Challenge of Measuring Hunger through Survey (2016)
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:ete:licosp:488089

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), LICOS - Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().