the FCS, data are collected on the 7-day recall of frequency of consumption of different food items, and food items are grouped into 8 specific food groups with each group given a weight representing the nutrient density of that food group (see Supplemental Web Appendix C for classification and their corresponding weights). The value of FCS ranges from 0 to 112 with a higher FCS representing a higher dietary diversity and/or frequency of consumption and higher nutritional value of a household’s diet and vice versa.

The household food insecurity access scale (HFIAS) is a measure developed by FANTA to assess food access problems faced by households during a recall period of 30 days. It aims to capture the changes in food consumption patterns and reflect the severity of food insecurity faced by households due to lack of or limited resources to access food. It is composed of nine questions, and these questions relate to three different domains of the access component food insecurity: anxiety and uncertainty about household food access, insufficient quality, and insufficient food intake (Swindale et al, 2006). Each question has four response options: never, rarely, sometimes, and often, which are coded 0, 1, 2, and 3 in order of increasing frequency (see Supplemental Web Appendix D for the complete list of questions asked to construct HFIAS). Responses to these nine questions are summed to construct a food insecurity score, with a maximum score of 27 indicating most food insecure households.

Another measure of food security we consider is the share of calories derived from starchy staples – or starchy staples ratio (SSR). It is measured as the percentage of calories derived from starchy staples. Starchy staples are energy-dense but are low in protein and micronutrients, which means that households with higher value of SSR will have a lower quality diet and will be more vulnerable to protein and micronutrient deficiencies. Moreover, starchy staples are not only cheaper sources of energy but also figure prominently as a part of household’s staple diet. Jensen and Miller (2010) suggest this to be a potentially promising way to capture food security within the household. It relies on consumption behavior to reveal the household food security situation, as opposed to caloric norms.<sup>7</sup> Finally, we also use the expenditure analog of the starchy staples ratio, which is the share of food expenditures that is devoted to the purchase of starchy staples. We call this the starchy staples expenditure ratio (SSEXR).

It is important to note that while this is the comprehensive list of all the food security indicators we analyze, what we actually have for each individual country is a strict subset of this list. This is because we use different surveys for different countries, and the kind of information available in these surveys varies quite a bit. One of the key caveats that should also be pointed out up front is that each of these food security measures is constructed at the household level except for the child dietary diversity score and mother’s dietary diversity score, which are available only for Bangladesh. It is well known that intrahousehold food requirements and food allocation differ significantly depending on the gender, age, and 11