the glass of milk subsidy program and malnutrition in peru this study of the vaso de leche glass of milk feeding program in peru looks for evidence that this in kind transfer program aimed at young children furthers nutritional objectives the study links public expenditure data with household survey data to substantiate the targeting and to model the determinants of nutritional outcomes it confirms that the social transfer program targets poor households and households with low nutritional status nevertheless the study fails to find econometric evidence that the nutritional objectives are being achieved

can fao s measure of chronic undernourishment be strengthened abstract in its sixth world food survey released at the 1996 world food summit the food and agriculture organization of the united nations fao reported that 841 million people in developing countries are chronically undernourished this number and its country and regional level disaggregations have proved tremendously useful to countless development aid agencies and researchers in the context of a recent wave of new nationally representative household food consumption and expenditure surveys this paper examines the estimation methodology underlying the food insecurity measure which relies on national aggregate measures of food availability and distribution the paper finds that the measure largely reflects national food availabilities and does not adequately capture people s ability to gain access to food the ultimate key to food security the implications for the indicator s use by policy makers in geographical targeting and tracking changes in food insecurity over time are drawn out the paper concludes by arguing that the time has come to review the potential for employing the new household survey data along with new methods to strengthen the empirical foundations of fao s measure

income elasticities for food calories and nutrients across africa a meta analysis abstract this paper aims to provide a better understanding of the relationship between income and the demand for different types of food nutrients and calories in africa by conducting a meta analysis of income elasticity estimates we build a meta sample consisting of 1523 food income elasticities 369 nutrient income elasticities and 123 calorie income elasticities extracted from 66 primary studies covering 48 african countries the sample displays a large heterogeneity in income elasticity estimates which our meta analysis aims to explain by looking into attributes of the primary studies and characteristics of the countries considered there are significant differences in the size of the income elasticities across food and nutrient groups foods that make up basic diets tend to have lower income elasticities while elasticities are considerably higher for less basic and more aspirational foods the role of methodological attributes of the primary studies in explaining heterogeneity is found to be small overall our results confirm that although income growth in africa will increase food consumption and lead to more nutritionally diverse diets it is also associated with excessive intakes of fats and sugars raising concerns about over in addition to undernutrition this suggests that income based policies can still play a role in the fight against hunger but that targeted programs are needed to promote nutritionally valuable and healthy diets

human and nature dynamics handy modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies abstract there are widespread concerns that current trends in resource use are unsustainable but possibilities of overshoot collapse remain controversial collapses have occurred frequently in history often followed by centuries of economic intellectual and population decline many different natural and social phenomena have been invoked to explain specific collapses but a general explanation remains elusive in this paper we build a human population dynamics model by adding accumulated wealth and economic inequality to a predator prey model of humans and nature the model structure and simulated scenarios that offer significant implications are explained four equations describe the evolution of elites commoners nature and wealth the model shows economic stratification or ecological strain can independently lead to collapse in agreement with the historical record the measure carrying capacity is developed and its estimation is shown to be a practical means for early detection of a collapse mechanisms leading to two types of collapses are discussed the new dynamics of this model can also reproduce the irreversible collapses found in history collapse can be avoided and population can reach a steady state at maximum carrying capacity if the rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level and if resources are distributed equitably

nutrients impacts and determinants understanding the determinants of nutrient intake and the influence of nutrition on performance is critical in designing policies to alleviate hunger and malnutrition a series of studies undertaken by the authors which are synthesized here analyzes the influence of prices income and women s schooling on the nutrient intake of those in developing countries and the effect of nutrition on health productivity wages and fertility these studies suggest that the impact of food price increases may be strong particularly among those with the lowest incomes that the growth of income may be less likely to improve nutrient intake than has been suggested by others and that womzen s schooling is important in improving nutrition these studies also indicate that nutrition exerts a positive influence on wages productivity and fertility our limited knowledge of the role and determinants of nutrition is reflected in the finding of unduly strong effects of seasonalitv on price nutrition relations and the lack of a direct association between nutrition and health the nutrition of poor populations is of substantial interest because of the widespread and plausible presumption that better nutrition improves the welfare of individuals in such populations nutrition also is of interest because of the common conjecture that better nutrition improves productivity a series of our studies have analyzed the relations between nutrition and health labor productivity and fertility and the relations between prices income women s schooling and nutrition intake here we synthesize the results of these studies and address some of the puzzles and policy implications that have arisen

reducing child malnutrition how far does income growth take us how rapidly will child malnutrition respond to income growth this article explores that question using household survey data from 12 countries as well as data on malnutrition rates in a cross section of countries since the 1970s both forms of analysis yield similar results increases in income at the household and national levels imply similar rates of reduction in malnutrition using these estimates and better than historical income growth rates the article finds that the millennium development goal of halving the prevalence of underweight children by 2015 is unlikely to be met through income growth alone what is needed to accelerate reductions in malnutrition is a balanced strategy of income growth and investment in more direct interventions

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

who are the world s food insecure new evidence from the food and agriculture organization s food insecurity experience scale summary until recently there was lacking a common food security measure and the necessary data to study the individual level determinants of food insecurity around the world in 2014 the food and agriculture organization s voices of the hungry project developed an experiential measure of food insecurity the food insecurity experience scale fies translated it into 200 languages and contracted gallup inc for collection of data through the gallup world poll this is the first paper that identifies and examines the common determinants of food insecurity in 134 countries using this cross country comparable experiential measure of food insecurity we also investigate whether and to what extent the common determinants of food insecurity identified in a global model differ across rankings of economic development using a series of multilevel linear probability models we find that the five characteristics associated with the largest increase in the likelihood of experiencing food insecurity around the world are having low levels of education weak social networks less social capital low household income and being unemployed we also find significant heterogeneity in the determinants of food insecurity over development rankings this study is an important first step in utilizing the new fies to document risk factors of food insecurity around the globe

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

measuring food insecurity the frequency and severity of coping strategies abstract defining and interpreting food security and measuring it in reliable valid and cost effective ways have proven to be stubborn problems facing researchers and programs intended to monitor food security risks this paper briefly reviews the conceptual and methodological literature on food insecurity measurment describes a particular method for distinguishing and measuring short term food insecurity at the household level and discusses ways of generalizing the method the method developed enumerates the frequency and severity of strategies relied on by urban households when faced with a short term insufficiency of food this method goes beyond more commonly used measures of caloric consumption to incorporate vulnerability elements of food insecurity as well as the deliberate actions of household decision makers when faced with food insufficiency

price cycles and booms dynamic search equilibrium search theory has been extensively and successfully applied to explain the persistence of price dispersion this paper presents an explicitly dynamic search model that is able to account for cyclical patterns of prices and demand over time these cyclical features of the model are the consequence of the dynamic strategic interaction between buyers and firms and do not require the presence of extraneous factors such as shocks or heterogeneity of agents in order to obtain the model builds on earlier work by kenneth burdett and kenneth l judd and may be interpreted as a dynamic extension of their model copyright 1992 by american economic association

how are we doing on poverty and hunger reduction a new measure of country performance abstract the paper presents a new composite indicator the poverty and hunger index phi to measure countries performance toward achieving millennium development goal no 1 mdg1 on halving poverty and hunger by 2015 building on the statistical structure of the human development index the phi combines all five official mdg1 indicators thereby generating insights on a country s net progress towards its own goal as opposed to progress measured by a single yardstick nonparametric analysis on the phi components provides further evidence on the nature of the relationship between poverty and hunger measures while cross country results show significant variance in progress between and within regions an extension of the phi allows for consideration of the rate of progress made by each country in its own terms that is based on where it needs to be to attain all 5 mdg1 targets by 2015 countries needing priority attention are identified as well as areas for future research and recommendations for post 2015 initiatives

governance quality remittances and their implications for food and nutrition security in sub saharan africa abstract despite impressive progress in the fight against malnutrition and hunger in recent years food and nutrition insecurity remains a major concern in sub saharan africa ssa countries in this study we employ a panel data covering 15 ssa countries from 1996 to 2015 to investigate the growth effects of remittances and quality of governance on food and nutrition security proxied by the average value of food production and the average dietary energy supply adequacy respectively we use a dynamic empirical model based on system gmm to control for unobserved heterogeneity and potential endogeneity of the explanatory variables the empirical results emanating from our analysis show that the interaction of remittances and the composite index of governance quality exerts positive and significant effects on the average value of food production and also contributes to the improvement of average dietary energy supply adequacy in ssa in addition the control of corruption government effectiveness political stability and rule of law scores increase both measures of food and nutrition security albeit the contribution of control over corruption score is relatively the largest as compared to other indicators of governance

wealthier is healthier we estimate the effect of income on health using cross country timeseries data on health infant and child mortality and life expectancy and income per capita we use instrumental variables estimates using exogenous determinants of income growth to identify the pure income effect on health isolated from reverse causation or incidental association the long run income elasticity of infant and child mortality in developing countries lies between 0 2 and 0 4 using these estimates we calculate that over a half a million child deaths in the developing world in 1990 alone can be attributed to the poor economic performance in the 1980s

does child undernutrition persist despite poverty reduction in developing countries quantile regression results abstract the eradication of child undernutrition and extreme poverty are important objectives for most societies countries with higher national incomes usually improve in both dimensions but not always at the same rate using quantile regression we show that poverty rates tend to decline with increased income at a roughly constant elasticity in contrast while the prevalence of child wasting declines at that same elasticity where it is most widespread the elasticity becomes smaller as wasting becomes less prevalent this finding suggests a greater need for increasingly targeted interventions to achieve a given reduction in undernutrition as its prevalence declines

does money matter the effects of cash transfers on child development in rural ecuador abstract a large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early life environments so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes these developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood yet remarkably little is known about whether poverty alleviation programs improve children s developmental outcomes we examine how a government run cash transfer program for poor mothers in rural ecuador influenced the development of young children random assignment at the parish level is used to identify program effects our data include a set of measures of cognitive ability that are not typically included in experimental or quasi experimental studies of the impact of cash transfers on child well being as well as a set of physical health measures that may be related to developmental outcomes the cash transfer program had positive although modest effects on the physical cognitive and socioemotional development of the poorest c

agricultural economics and distributional effects the paper examines the main issues surrounding distributional effects in the domains of natural resource management and land policies agricultural technology and research policies agricultural market and trade policies and consumer oriented policies including standards subsidies and labeling agriculture is drifting into an ever more drastic bifurcation at a global level and within many countries correcting that bifurcation will require large investments in rural areas and rural people in institutions and in information and biological technologies accessible by the poor in the world s smallholder sector large and growing national and international inequalities related to agriculture and rural areas threaten peace growth and sustainable development

how important is economic growth for reducing undernourishment in developing countries abstract there is intense debate in the literature about how important economic growth is for solving the problem of undernourishment this paper focuses on the rate of change in the prevalence of undernourishment and looks at whether higher economic growth speeds up reductions in undernutrition in developing countries the analysis uses panel data analysis on data spanning 22 years 1991 2012 and covering 27 developing countries results reveal that faster annual economic growth leads to larger annual improvements in undernourishment rates both annual and long term economic growth are relevant sustained economic growth has a greater positive impact on undernutrition than short term economic growth in addition to economic growth investments in health education and access to drinking water are also enabling factors for reducing undernourishment in conclusion increased income growth can hasten the effects of food policies aimed at reducing undernourishment but not to the extent that sustained growth and better access to health education and drinking water can

the incidence of visible underemployment evidence for trinidad and tobago this article presents an empirical analysis of the incidence of visible underemployment in trinidad and tobago visible underemployment consists of workers who work less than the normal duration of working hours but are willing and available to work more we find that compared to other groups of the labour force the visibly underemployed tend to be less educated and are more likely to work in the private sector we also find that their revealed behaviour is consistent with their desire for more hours only about 50 per cent of the visibly underemployed are able to find full time employment within three months and little except firm size helps predict who will

human development in poor countries on the role of private incomes and public services development is often taken to mean rising incomes discussions of the goals of development now often emphasize the reduction of poverty rather than raising average incomes per se the role of social services particularly basic health and education has also received greater emphasis in the 1980s viewed mainly as instruments for raising the incomes of the poor but in all these approaches income growth of one sort or another is what development is all about a rather different view of the meaning of development has recently found expression in the 1990 human development report hrd produced by the united nations development programme a conceptual underpinning for this approach can be found in the work of amartya sen the essence of this view is that human development what people can actually do and be is the overriding purpose of economic development underdevelopment is viewed as the lack of certain basic capabilities rather than lack of income per se we do not aim here to advocate one of these approaches over the other but rather to explore their implications for development policy for instance what does the human development approach imply about the role of economic growth and in particular about reducing income poverty should development priorities shift toward the provision of public services in poor countries even if such a shift is at the expense of income growth

farm level pathways to improved nutritional status global national and local policies and programs for agricultural development arerecurrently justified based on their alleged role in improving food and nutrition security however strikingly little evidence is available to prove that a direct household level linkbetween agricultural production and improved nutrition exists the objective of thisspecial issue is to systematically and empirically test using data from africa and southasia whether a relationship between household agricultural production and nutrition canbe found overall the studies in this special issue support the hypothesis that householdagricultural production has direct and important linkages with dietary patterns andnutrition

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

a flexible assurance bonding system for improved environmental management abstract current methods of regulating activities that are known or suspected to be environmentally danaging are not working well they induce legal confrontation obfuscation and government intrusion into the inner workings of firms they tend to suppress technical and social innovation aimed at long term solutions they do not mesh well with the market signals that firms use to make decisions this paper discusses some of the underlying reasons for this problem and outlines a flexible environmental assurance bonding system designed to incorporate environmental criteria and uncertainty into the market system and to induce positive environmental technological innovation in addition to direct charges for known environmental damages an assurance bond equal to the current best estimate of the largest potential future environmental damages would be levied and kept in an interest bearing escrow account the bond plus a portion of the interest would be returned if and only if the firm could prove that the suspected damages had not occured or would not occur if damages did occur the bond would be used to rehabilitate or repair the environment and to compensate injured parties by requiring the users of environmental resources to post a bond adequate to cover potential future environmental damages with the possibility for refunds the burden of proof is shifted from the public to the resource user and a strong economic incentive is provided to research the true costs of environmentally innovative activities and to develop innovative cost effective pollution control technologies

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

how responsive is body weight to transitory income changes evidence from rural tanzania we use time series of rainfall to estimate the response of body weight to transitory changes in household income in rural tanzania we find that the response of body weight to income changes is positive on average but that the impact is highest for female children and lower for adults for female children a ten percent increase in household income implies an increase in body weight by about 0 4 kg in contrast the body weight of adolescents and young adults is virtually invariant to income changes

transfer payments mothers income and child health in ecuador abstract we evaluate the impact of the bono solidario a transfer payment scheme in ecuador on children s nutritional status in addition to testing for pure income effects because the programme transferred money to mothers of young children we test whether mother s income has a stronger effect on children s heights and weights than ordinary household income we draw two main conclusions that the bono solidario transfer payment scheme has had a statistically significant but quite modest impact on children s nutritional status and that this impact is no different than any other income effect on height and weight in particular the fact that the bono is transferred to mothers has not made it more efficacious at reducing malnutrition than other household income

paths to success the relationship between human development and economic growth summary this paper explores the two way relationship between economic growth eg and human development hd we develop panel data strategies to estimate the strength of these relationships and find that hd plays an essential role in determining growth trajectories our measure of sustained growth not only is hd a final product in the sense that it measures basic human well being but it is also a critical input into eg our findings illustrate the empirical relevance of endogenous growth and are consistent with threshold effect models our results imply that successful policy requires an early focus on hd not only because of its direct impact but also because of its feedback effect on sustaining eg

how potent is economic growth in reducing undernutrition what are the pathways of impact new cross country evidence this article uses panel data from 63 developing countries over the period 1970 96 to explore the relationship between income growth and child undernutrition rates it has two broad objectives the first is to determine how strong the relationship is whether it is causal and the magnitude of the contribution the income growth has made to reductions in child undernutrition over the past 25 years the second broad objective is to examine the specific pathways through which income growth affects undernutrition the article represents the first effort to merge child undernutrition rates by year for multiple years with the various determinants of child undernutrition it thus allows for estimations that take into account country specific characteristics also for the first time the study 1 tests for the endogeneity of potential determinants 2 calculates the historical contribution of longrun income growth to reductions in child undernutrition and 3 identifies the pathways through which income growth affects undernutrition section ii discusses the determinants of child nutritional status from a conceptual standpoint section iii describes the variables employed the data and the estimation strategy the results are presented in section iv and section v concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for policies to reduce child undernutrition excerpt

the politics of success in the fight against malnutrition in peru abstract the dramatic reduction in children s chronic malnutrition in peru observed in recent years has defied the patterns of stunting reduction worldwide after nearly a decade of stalled progress the government reported a reduction in stunting rates of nearly 10 points from 29 8 in 2005 to 18 1 in 2011 the specialized literature has acknowledged the critical role that immediate e g increasing breastfeeding promotion and underlying e g investments to improve household food security interventions have played in reducing stunting black et al 2013 as well as the contributing role of enabling factors related to economic performance this paper offers an alternative explanation to success by looking at the shift in the government s nutrition strategy after 2006 with the formation of the child malnutrition initiative cmi a civil society working platform and the adoption of a national poverty reduction strategy prioritizing nutrition interventions known as crecer and conditional cash transfers juntos the paper uses veto players theory to explain how these changes effectively contributed to policy change by reducing the effective number of nutrition stakeholders involved and facilitating policy agreements around a common policy platform and established goals the peruvian case also highlights the importance of the government s public commitment to reduce chronic malnutrition in children under five by 5 percent in 5 years 5 by 5 by 5 and the accompanying role advocacy and monitoring from civil society organizations the paper looks at the success of implementing the nutrition strategy in three dimensions horizontally it looks at the coordination between government and non government agencies to converge around a common policy discourse vertically it looks at the implementation of the nutrition strategy across national regional and municipal governments and financially it looks at the coordinated and conditional allocation of nutrition funding and how this created greater incentives for horizontal and vertical coordination the paper draws some theoretical and policy implications for improving the effective and accountable delivery of nutrition interventions in peru and other countries outside latin america

international migration and nutritional outcomes in tajikistan abstract tajikistan is the country with the largest share of remittances to gdp in the world at the same time it suffers from stubbornly high levels of child malnutrition against which only very slow progress has been made this paper investigates the relationship between international migration and child malnutrition using data from a recent nationally representative household survey there are theoretical reasons to expect that migration may be exerting both positive and negative effects on nutrition and food security so that understanding what the net effect may be is essentially an empirical question our results indicate that migration appears to be playing a positive role in enhancing child growth patterns as measured by height for age z scores in the country we explore some of the possible channels through which this effect might be operating and find that one such channel is by increasing households kilocalorie consumption

robust multidimensional spatial poverty comparisons in ghana madagascar and uganda spatial poverty comparisons are investigated in three african countries using multidimensional indicators of well being the work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that it seeks poverty orderings that are robust to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines and indices in addition the study seeks to ensure that the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures for multiple welfare variables in contrast to earlier work the methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as union intersection and intermediate approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well being furthermore unlike much of the stochastic dominance literature this work computes the sampling distributions of the poverty estimators to perform statistical tests of the difference in poverty measures the methods are applied to two measures of well being the log of household expenditures per capita and children s height forage z scores using data from the 1988 ghana living standards study survey the 1993 national household survey in madagascar and the 1999 national household survey in uganda bivariate poverty comparisons are at odds with univariate comparisons in several interesting ways most important it cannot always be concluded that poverty is lower in urban areas in one region compared with that in rural areas in another even though univariate comparisons based on household expenditures per capita almost always lead to that conclusion

sustainable land use management under biodiversity lag effects the destruction of natural habitats for agricultural production results in local biodiversity loss biodiversity loss in turn affects agricultural production indirectly through a range of biodiversity dependent ecosystem services land conversion thus results in a negative externality mediated by changes in biodiversity when the consequences of this externality are delayed in time lack of internalization results in overshoot and collapse dynamics which are undesirable from a sustainability perspective here we emphasize the importance of forward looking policies for the long term sustainability of human nature interactions we show that the internalization of this externality through a land tax can result in several win win effects in the long run first more biodiversity is preserved at equilibrium which increases the carrying capacity and total well being of the human population second a taxation path that maximizes the discounted sum of human utilities prevents or greatly alleviates overshoot and collapse crises thus increasing the sustainability of the system in particular this result holds in the case of imperfect information regarding the precise temporal dynamics of biodiversity loss suggesting that the design of efficient land use management policies is possible despite incomplete ecological data this study highlights the need to internalize biodiversity dependent externalities through economic incentives especially under uncertainty regarding long term ecological dynamics

developmental drivers of nutritional change a cross country analysis summary we utilize a rich cross country data set to understand within country changes in nutrition with a focus on the role of general developmental factors we find that economic growth is a strong predictor of nutritional performance as is growth in food production although only in more food insecure countries we find no evidence that infrastructure is directly important but greater asset ownership improved access to health services higher rates of female secondary education and lower fertility rates are all strong predictors of improvements in nutrition we show that national success stories are largely consistent with these findings

does trade openness contribute to food security a dynamic panel analysis abstract despite significant progress in the fight against hunger during the last decades food insecurity remains a major problem in many countries especially developing ones in this study we use a large cross country data to investigate the impact of trade openness and other factors on food security measured by dietary energy consumption we employ a system gmm approach to account for unobserved heterogeneity correlated individual effects and potential endogeneity of the explanatory variables the empirical results reveal that trade openness and economic growth exert positive and significant impacts on dietary energy consumption and also contribute to improvements in dietary diversity the results are robust to the inclusion of additional variables capturing specific agro climatic constraints e g weather related and regional country characteristics and to the sample composition most geographical regions are found to have significantly higher food security levels compared to sub saharan africa additional results indicate that besides calorie consumption trade openness also improves dietary diversity and diet quality related aspects of food security