Measuring Chronic Hunger from Diet Snapshots: Why 'Bottom up' Survey Counts and 'Top down' FAO Estimates Will Never Meet

John Gibson

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato

Abstract: Widely used global hunger estimates from the FAO are ‘top down’ in that they combine data on each country’s total food balance with variance estimates from household surveys. Food balance sheets are only annual so the FAO just estimate the prevalence of chronic hunger. These estimates are criticized and recent research advocates ‘bottom up’ counts of hunger directly from household consumption surveys. These surveys give a snapshot of living standards, for the week, fortnight or month reference period, so only noisy measures of annual dietary energy can be derived from them. This overstated between-households variance raises the share of the population who appear below nutritional standards, for any standard set below the median, and so overstates chronic hunger. In this paper, a new method of deriving chronic hunger estimates from snapshot surveys is proposed, which also lets the transient component of hunger 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 the total and uncorrected snapshot surveys would overstate the chronic hunger rate by almost 90 percent.

Keywords: chronic hunger; survey design; transient hunger; undernourishment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 O15 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2016-08-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-sea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wai:econwp:16/07

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