analyzing nutritional impacts of policies an empirical study for malawi summary widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate strategies presupposing good knowledge about nutritional impacts of policies little previous work has been carried out in this direction especially with respect to micronutrients we use representative household data from malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption these estimates are applied for policy simulations given multiple nutritional deficiencies income related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition while consumer price subsidies for maize improve calorie and mineral consumption they can worsen vitamin consumption in urban areas

the impact of survey characteristics on the measurement of food consumption abstract survey characteristics affect the quality of the measurement of food consumption within households thus it is important to identify best practices for designing surveys that collect food data this paper analyses the impact of survey characteristics on the measurement of food consumption from a sample of 81 national surveys results highlight regularities that can inform best practices in designing surveys and promoting the use of the data for multiple purposes surveys focused on food acquisition collect higher food quantities compared to those that target food consumption surveys based on recall interviews collect higher food quantities compared to those based on diaries but the difference decreases with long reference periods the use of standard units of measurement as well as the consideration of partakers in meals and of seasonality generates significant differences in the survey results the impact of the different survey characteristics carries substantive implications when food consumption data are employed for assessing food security conditions the results are part of a wider work program aimed at improving the quality of household survey data more evidence is needed ideally through coordinated sets of analyses and experiments in different contexts additionally survey characteristics must be complemented by effective field work in order to generate high quality data towards this end statistical capacity development is crucial to promote better data and more evidence based decision making

an integration of capm with is lm analysis into a unified theory of aggregate demand ever since james tobin 23 explained the demand for money in a portfolio context economists have been aware of the relation between portfolio behavior and aggregate demand on a most basic level since the demand for money is at least partly dependent on portfolio behavior the lm and aggregate demand schedules are also dependent nevertheless formal derivations of aggregate demand schedules e g from is lm schedules have not as yet taken portfolio considerations fully into account likewise the vast literature on capital market theory emanating out of the sharpe 22 lintner 18 mossin 19 mean variance capital asset pricing model capm assumes that the level of aggregate demand or income is exogenously determined two of the most important literatures in macroeconomics aggregate demand theory and capital market theory have been largely developed along separate paths the purpose of this paper is to unify the relationship between aggregate demand theory and capital market theory by explicitly incorporating the capm into an is lm framework 2 in this way we can examine the effects of shocks to the is and lm schedules upon the returns to riskless and risky securities and the feedback effects upon aggregate demand the influence of these shocks on aggregate demand i e the monetary and autonomous spending multipliers will be shown to depend on the amounts of security risk beta coefficients as well as upon investors risk return attitudes 3

how reliable are household expenditures as a proxy for permanent income implications for the income nutrition relationship using short run expenditures from household surveys as a proxy may create attenuated estimates of the impact of permanent income on economic outcomes we use repeated observations to calculate reliability ratios and estimate errors in variables regressions of the impact of income on nutrition we find significant responses to income in contrast to previous influential studies

the great indian calorie debate explaining rising undernourishment during india s rapid economic growth abstract the prevalence of undernourishment in india the percent of people consuming insufficient calories to meet their energy requirements has been rising steadily since the mid 1980s paradoxically this period has been one of robust poverty reduction and rapid economic growth the reasons for the apparent reductions in calorie consumption underlying increased undernourishment have been the subject of intense debate both within india and internationally this paper critically reviews this debate finding that is has taken place outside of the context of india s recent nutrition and epidemiological transitions which appear to have brought with them increased not decreased food consumption the debate has also taken place under the unchallenged assumption that the data on which the conflicting trends are based collected as part of the country s household consumption and expenditure surveys hcess are reliable the paper provides supporting literature and empirical evidence that a probable key source of the calorie decline is incomplete collection of data on food consumed away from peoples homes which is widespread and rapidly increasing complete measurement of this food source in the hcess of all developing countries is vital for accurate measurement of both undernourishment and poverty and for resolving the indian calorie debate

methods of household consumption measurement through surveys experimental results from tanzania consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards however accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions including the level of reporting the length of the reference period and the degree of commodity detail these variations occur both across countries and also over time within countries there is little current understanding of the implications of such changes for spatially and temporally consistent measurement of household consumption and poverty a field experiment in tanzania tests eight alternative methods to measure household consumption on a sample of 4 000 households there are significant differences between consumption reported by the benchmark personal diary and other diary and recall formats under reporting is particularly relevant in illiterate households and for urban respondents completing household diaries recall modules measure lower consumption than a personal diary with larger gaps among poorer households and households with more adult members variations in reporting accuracy by household characteristics are also discussed and differences in measured poverty as a result of survey design are explored the study concludes with recommendations for methods of survey based consumption measurement in low income countries

a food demand system based on demand for characteristics if there is curvature in the slutsky matrix what do the curves look like and why abstract a food demand system is proposed based on demand for energy variety and tastes of foods by specifying utility as an explicit function of these characteristics the entire matrix of demand elasticities can be derived for n foods and one non food from prior specification of just four elasticities while avoiding any assumption of separability between foods this framework can explain why poorest groups often are most price responsive but also can account for highest price responsiveness by middle income groups the system is applied to published food consumption data for urban and rural populations in pakistan elasticities are compared with those obtained in a published pakistan study applying an almost ideal demand system aids

decomposing response errors in food consumption measurement implications for survey design from a survey experiment in tanzania there is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys both across countries and over time this variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates that are differentially influenced by contrasting types of survey response error although previous studies have documented the extent of net error in alternative survey designs little is known about the relative influence of the different response errors that underpin a survey estimate this study leverages a recent randomized food consumption survey experiment in tanzania to shed light on the relative influence of these various error types the observed deviation of measured household consumption from a benchmark is decomposed into item specific consumption incidence and consumption value so as to investigate effects related to a the omission of any consumption and then b the error in value reporting conditional on positive consumption the results show that various survey designs exhibit widely differing error decompositions and hence a simple summary comparison of the total recorded consumption across surveys will obscure specific error patterns and inhibit the lessons for improved consumption survey design in light of these findings the relative performance of common survey designs is discussed and design lessons are drawn to enhance the accuracy of item specific consumption reporting and consequently the measures of total household food consumption

money and economic activity inventories and business cycles abstract incomplete information is a necessary condition for any real effects produced by monetary impulses an alternative to the local global inference problem is explored in this paper agents are confronted with permanent and transitory shocks even with full knowledge about the stochastic structure their best perception at any particular time will usually be erroneous prices for each period are set at the beginning of the period on the basis of market conditions the realization of the shock process thus creates a short run disequilibrium absorbed by inventory adjustments this adjustment translates perceived transitory monetary shocks into serially correlated output movements the analysis proceeds within the context of rational expectations it offers a generalization of equilibrium analysis in two respects prices are always in equilibrium relative to perceived conditions but they do not reflect all ongoing shocks quantity adjustments reflect the perceived transitory shocks the framework used involves moreover a stock flow interaction operated by inventory adjustments the stock flow interaction imposes at any time a future expected adjustment path for price level and quantities to the system s unique stock equilibrium a major implication of the analysis resolves a puzzle experienced in a recent paper by robert hall it reconciles intertemporal substitution with lagged effects of monetary impulses it also reconciles small and inconclusive cyclic movements in real wages with the occurrence of production function and large variations in unemployment lastly the nature of the inference problem determined by the pattern of incomplete information produces serially correlated movements conditioned on large permanent shocks

inventory behaviour and market power an empirical investigation abstract this paper examines the empirical relation between the market power of a firm and the level and variability of its inventories we suggest that firms with greater market power hold more inventories and that their inventories are more volatile these hypotheses were tested on a large sample of industrial firms using two different measures of market power and applying a number of estimation techniques the results strongly support our hypotheses

understanding the health and nutritional status of children in ghana abstract the data set of the ghana living standards survey glss round 1 1987 1988 was utilized to analyse the principal determinants publicly and privately of health and nutrition of children under five in ghana while in most health and nutrition studies the emphasis is either on health related factors such as occurrence of illness immunization accessibility to light electricity the role of breastfeeding or on food availability and food consumption related factors in the present study an attempt has been made to incorporate both aspects simultaneously on the basis of the glss ghanaian households spend at the average approximately 60 of total expenses on food changes in relative prices of the various food commodities differently affect household food availability lowering prices of relatively cheap foods e g millet cassava tends to have a strong positive effect on total household kcal availability at the level of the household the absolute number of nondependents presumed to represent the available labour force is positively correlated with household food availability there is also a positive correlation between the mothers level of education 10 yrs of schooling and above and the nutrition level of children occurrence of illness in children could be shown to negatively affect their health and nutrition status finally a specific finding in the analysis was a rather strong negative effect of prolonged breastfeeding on the nutritional status of children among the policy recommendations emanating from the research are 1 promotion of efficient production and marketing of cassava 2 efforts to achieve slowing down of rural urban migration to prevent labour shortages in rural households 3 improving water and sanitation conditions 4 expanding immunization programmes in particular in rural areas and 5 promoting better weaning practices when children are no longer fully breastfed

relative price dispersion and economic shocks an inventory adjustment approach the issue of relative price dispersion rpd has gained prominence in recent years as the economy was subject to economic shocks and to high and variable levels of inflation the concern about the increased rpd was due to its potentially harmful effect on the economy recently blejer and leiderman 4 evaluated empirically the effect of rpd on economic activity in the postwar united states and found that increased rpd leads to a decrease in the level of output and to an increase in the rate of unemployment israelsen and mcdonald 13 showed in a partial equilibrium context that when wage changes are firmly linked to the general price level and labor mobility between markets or industries is limited an increase in rpd may lead to increasing unemployment pischer 10 suggested that rpd is not necessarily harmful but when coupled with unexpected inflation it may be associated with information confusion leading to a loss through the misallocation of resources these concerns have raised the interest in understanding the factors causing and affecting rpd both theoretically and empirlcally the prevailing theoretical explanations of the factors affecting rpd are based on two main approaches c ne approach is based on misinformation type models inspired by lucas s work 14 where individuals are confused between aggregate shocks and relative marketspecific ones barro 3 and cukierman and wachtel 9 have proposed that the greater the vanance of the aggregate shocks the greater the rpd barro 3 pp

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

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

the effect of income on demand for food in poor countries are our food consumption databases giving us reliable estimates abstract cross section estimates of income elasticities for food staples in the aggregate based on quantity information from household food expenditure surveys are often in the 0 3 0 6 range it is shown that differences in per capita calorie intakes across income groups implied by these income elasticities are grossly inconsistent with observed differences in bodyweights moreover time series data frequently indicate that national per capita consumption of food staples in the aggregate remains constant even as per capita gross national product rises substantially cross section income elasticity estimates are biased upwards due to the failure of food expenditure surveys to undertake an accurate accounting of food transfers from high to low income groups biases which are not generated by survey techniques which record food intakes directly

timing decisions and the behavior of mutual fund systematic risk the investment performance of professionally managed portfolios in general and mutual funds in particular has been the subject of considerable attention in finance fama 9 has suggested that overall portfolio performance be broken down in such a manner that the individual sources of performance can be identified two basic sources are 1 the ability of the portfolio manager to forecast price movements of individual common stocks relative to stocks in general selectivity or microforecasting and 2 the ability to forecast the direction of the stock market relative to fixed income securities timing or macroforecasting

household income women s income share and food calorie intake in south western nigeria abstract current debates on the nature of intra household preferences and resource control raises the question of how intra household redistribution of income from men and women compares with increasing total household income as strategies for increasing calorie intake among low income households i estimate calorie income and calorie women s income share elasticities for a random sample of low income households from the rural areas of south western nigeria i find that calorie income elasticity is positive and small 0 194 but four times as large as calorie women s income share elasticity suggesting that calorie intake is affected more by total disposable income than by its distribution pattern second i find a small and negative effect of women s income share on per caput calorie intake 0 04 which is a rejection of the hypothesis that increases in women s share of income will increase calorie intake and suggests that intra household income re distribution from men to women may not be an effective policy for increasing food calorie intake among households in the study area

data gaps data incomparability and data imputation a review of poverty measurement methods for data scarce environments this paper reviews methods that have been employed to estimate poverty in contexts where household consumption data are unavailable or missing these contexts range from completely missing and partially missing consumption data in cross sectional household surveys to missing panel household data the paper focuses on methods that aim to compare trends and dynamic patterns of poverty outcomes over time it presents the various methods under a common framework with pedagogical discussion on the intuition empirical illustrations are provided using several rounds of household survey data from vietnam furthermore the paper provides a practical guide with detailed instructions on computer programs that can be used to implement the reviewed techniques

household survey data from developing countries progress and prospects assessing the adequacy of household surveys from developing countries can only be done with reference to the purpose s the data are meant to serve we assume that the objective of data collection is to support analysis of a wide range of issues concerning household welfare and behavior especially the prevalence causes and effects of poverty in its multiple dimensions analyses that address these issues can be arrayed in two dimensions methodological complexity which ranges from simple crosstabulations to sophisticated econometric techniques and specificity of the contribution to knowledge which ranges from analysis that addresses a specific policy decision in a particular country to general contributions to knowledge on economic development or research methods a few examples illustrate this typology descriptive statistics on participation in a government program by consumption quintile region or year are methodologically simple and country policy specific compilation of such work across many countries to obtain stylized facts is also methodologically simple but contributes to general knowledge of development using a specific model of household behavior to estimate the impact of charging higher prices for publicly provided services in a particular country is methodologically complex yet countryand policy specific rigorous econometric tests of alternative models of household behavior are methodologically complex and contribute to general knowledge beyond application of the method to a particular data set we discuss the adequacy of household survey data with respect to seven criteria for some criteria the threshold for adequacy varies within the two dimensional methodologyspecificity space

food counts measuring food consumption and expenditures in household consumption and expenditure surveys this special issue presents new evidence on the impact of survey design choices on the quality and availability of data collected in household consumption and expenditure surveys hces the 13 studies in this issue analyze how different survey design options affect the quality of the data being collected and the implications for statistical inference and policy analysis the studies offer practical insights into survey design for national statistical offices and survey practitioners worldwide and also provide policymakers with improved tools and a better understanding of poverty food security and nutrition for effective policymaking

how serious is the neglect of intrahousehold inequality in this report the authors develop a framework for assessing the consequences of ignoring intrahousehold inequality in the measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality they apply this framework to data for the philippines and conclude that 1 the result of neglecting intrahousehold inequality will probably be considerable understatement of the levels of poverty and inequality with the philippine data measured levels of inequality and poverty were off 30 percent as a result of ignoring intrahousehold variation and 2 patterns of inequality revealed by household level data are somewhat different from patterns revealed by individual level data but the differences seem not to be dramatic to confirm these results the exercise should be repeated with data from other countries

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

a shifting regimes approach to the stationarity of the market model parameters of individual securities recent studies indicate that the widespread assumption of parameter stationarity in empir ical applications of asset pricing models may be inappropriate this paper investigates the feasibility of modeling parameter instability as a sequence of persistent stable regimes reeursive residual and log likelihood techniques are combined to detect and locate shift points the results indicate that regime shifts are widespread frequent and often large enough to significantly effect empirical findings the nature of the shifts appears to be a rotation of the regression line indicating that correction of both alpha and beta parameters is required

economies of scale household size and the demand for food household scale economies are plausibly attributed to shared household public goods that make larger households better off at the same level of per capita resources larger households should therefore have higher per capita consumption of private goods such as food provided that they do not substitute too much toward the effectively cheaper public goods the evidence shows exactly the opposite data from rich and poor countries indicate that at constant per capita total expenditure the per capita demand for food decreases with household size and that it does so most in the poorest countries where substitution should be the least

does increase in women s income relative to men s income increase food calorie intake in poor households evidence from nigeria this article addresses the important but not widely investigated question of how calorie consumption in african low income households would respond to intrahousehold redistribution of income from men to women specifically i use survey data on a sample of 480 households from semirural areas of south western nigeria to analyze the response of per capita calorie intake to changes in women s share of household income after controlling for per capita income and demographic characteristics at individual household and community levels i also examine the effect of marginal increases in household income on per capita calorie intake conditional on the income distribution factor women s share of income my results suggest that redistributing household income from men to women would neither raise per capita food energy intake nor increase the quality of food calorie source of households in rural south western nigeria i also find that while the income elasticity of quantity of calorie intake is close to zero income elasticity for quality of calorie intake is substantially positive i conclude that neither gender neutral household income increases nor redistribution of household income in favor of women would substantially motivate increased amounts of food energy intake within households in the population under study however gender neutral increase in household income is likely to substantially increase the household demand for high quality food calorie sources

impact of survey design in the estimation of habitual food consumption abstract this paper evaluates the impact of survey design on food consumption measurement using data from the mongolia household socio economic survey mses 2007 2008 we exploit the fact that the mses uses a diversified approach to collect food data by measuring consumption acquisition and stocks using both diaries and recall interviews first we estimate the effect of diary length on reporting of food consumption finding a significant decrease of reported food over time we conclude that shorter diaries would increase the quality of estimates and lower the costs of inquiry second we show that recall interviews combined with a measurement of stocks perform well in measuring household food consumption compared to diaries third we find cyclical variation in food consumption and acquisition not only between months but also within months and weeks especially for food acquisition we detect large difference within months which can lead to biased estimates of food acquisition this highlights the need for enumeration to be spread over time to overcome cyclicality on food acquisition and consumption

the effects of data collection methods on calorie expenditure elasticity estimates a study from the dominican republic abstract using data from a nationally representative household survey in the dominican republic we find that the estimates of calorie expenditure elasticity vary widely depending upon the form of calorie variable used estimated elasticity is lower for calories purchased than for calories prepared for consumption in the home the divergence between the estimates increases at higher income levels there is a downward bias in the estimates obtained from purchase data due to some missing information on infrequent bulk purchases and greater memory lapse in recalling purchases we conclude that surveys undertaken to estimate calorie income elasticity should measure calories from consumption data if purchase data are used the period of recall should be flexible and defined by the respondent for each commodity so that infrequent purchases are captured survey methods should be standardized if elasticity estimates are to be compared across populations

measurement error in recall surveys and the relationship between household size and food demand variation in household survey design and implementation is used to obtain evidence of nonrandom measurement error in recall surveys of household expenditure these surveys which are used especially in developing countries appear to have measurement errors in food expenditures and in food budget shares that are correlated with household size these correlated errors may be part of the explanation for a puzzling pattern of falling food demand with rising household size in poorer countries

does it matter how we survey demand for food evidence from kenya and the philippines abstract this article examines the reliability of food quantity information collected from expenditure surveys and finds that measurement errors will very often be systematically correlated with income such that the response of food intakes to increases in income is seriously overstated this may be firstly because food quantities are not measured independently of income if total expenditures are the proxy used for income and secondly because food transfers in the form of guest and hired worker meals are under recorded these biases are illustrated using household surveys from kenya and the philippines

analyzing nutritional impacts of price and income related shocks in malawi simulating household entitlements to food the 2007 2008 food price crisis and the following global economic recession has temporarily increased the number of people to suffer from hunger while the impacts can be measured with precision only ex post for policy makers it is critical to get a sense of likely impacts ex ante in order to plan approaches to mitigate these impacts in this paper we adopt a very simple micro based simulation approach to analyze how changes in prices of specific food groups such as maize prices or prices for staple foods as well as how negative short term household level income shocks affect the entitlements to calorie consumption of individuals and how these changes affect overall food poverty we illustrate our approach using household survey data from malawi we find that food poverty is of serious concern with large within country variations we find that price shocks for staple foods have a considerable impact on food security with particularly strong effects on poor net food buyers in rural and urban areas this paper demonstrates that it is possible to estimate food security impacts of price and income shocks ex ante in a relatively straightforward fashion that can be done relatively quickly and that is suitable for cross country assessments of the likely impacts of shocks on food security and the design of appropriate response measures

dietary effects of the food stamp program based on data from the 1979 80 survey of food consumption in low income households this paper estimates the effects of changes in cash income and the food stamp benefit on household nutrient availability while controlling for two potential sources of selection bias the major finding of the empirical analysis is that the estimated dietary effects of changes in food stamp benefits are considerably larger than those resulting from changes in cash income with estimates of the ratios of the mpc for the food stamp benefit to the cash income mpc ranging from three to seven across nutrients no significant evidence of selection bias was found and the estimated dietary effects of food stamp benefits from the selection bias models are similar to those from the basic model estimated by ordinary least squares regression