Assessing the nonlinearity of the calorie-income relationship: an estimation strategy – with new insights on nutritional transition in Vietnam

Huong Thi Trinh, Michel Simioni () and Christine Thomas-Agnan
Additional contact information
Huong Thi Trinh: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, Thuongmai University - Partenaires INRAE
Michel Simioni: UMR MOISA - Marchés, Organisations, Institutions et Stratégies d'Acteurs - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - Montpellier SupAgro - Centre international d'études supérieures en sciences agronomiques - CIHEAM-IAMM - Centre International de Hautes Etudes Agronomiques Méditerranéennes - Institut Agronomique Méditerranéen de Montpellier - CIHEAM - Centre International de Hautes Études Agronomiques Méditerranéennes - Montpellier SupAgro - Institut national d’études supérieures agronomiques de Montpellier, IREEDS - Institute of Research in Economics, Environment and Data Science

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Assessing the nonlinearity of the calorie-income relationship is a crucial issue when evaluating policies aimed at fighting against malnutrition. A natural choice would be to adopt a fully nonparametric specification of the relationship in order to let the data reveal its nonlinearity. But, we would be faced with the problem of the curse of dimensionality due to the presence of many control variables in addition to income. Here, we first propose to estimate generalized additive models where only income is supposed to enter nonlinearly in the specification. Second, we use a recent cross-validation procedure in order to choose among various competing specifications including the parametric double-log specification widely used in the literature in addition to GAM specifications. This methodology is implemented for each of the six waves of the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey from 2004 to 2014. The calorie-income relationship is nonlinear whatever the wave. A strong response of calorie intake to an increase in income for poorest households is highlighted, showing that there is still room for income-based policies to fight against malnutrition. A byproduct of this methodology is the decomposition of the evolution of average calorie intake between the two waves in the part due to population change and that coming from the change in calorie-income relationship, shedding new light on the nutritional transition in Vietnam.

Keywords: calorie-income relationship; generalized additive model; decomposition methods; vietnam; nutritional transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-02628994v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published in World Development, 2018, 110, pp.192-204. ⟨10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.05.030⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-02628994v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Assessing the nonlinearity of the calorie-income relationship: An estimation strategy – With new insights on nutritional transition in Vietnam (2018)
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:journl:hal-02628994

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.05.030

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().