Predicting Food Crises

Bo Andree, Andres Fernando Chamorro Elizondo, Aart C. Kraay, Phoebe Girouard Spencer and Dieter Wang

No 9412, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Globally, more than 130 million people are estimated to be in food crisis. Thesehumanitarian disasters are associated with severe impacts on livelihoods that can reverse years of development gains. Theexisting outlooks of crisis-affected populations rely on expert assessment of evidence and are limited in theirtemporal frequency and ability to look beyond several months. This paper presents a statistical forecastingapproach to predict the outbreak of food crises with sufficient lead time for preventive action. Different usecases are explored related to possible alternative targeting policies and the levels at which finance is typicallyunlocked. The results indicate that, particularly at longer forecasting horizons, the statistical predictions comparefavorably to expert-based outlooks. The paper concludes that statistical models demonstrate good ability to detect futureoutbreaks of food crises and that using statistical forecasting approaches may help increase lead time for action.

Keywords: Public Health Promotion; Development Economics & Aid Effectiveness; Foreign Aid; Inequality; Food Security; Nutrition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09-22
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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