targeting and monitoring the effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs – then it becomes reasonable to expect that in addition to the appropriateness of the context and the associated ease and cost-effectiveness of the requisite instrument, the choice of food security indicator should also be guided by the extent to which it carries useful signals about the nutritional status of the underlying population. An indicator of food security that is easy and cost-effective to collect _and_ best correlated with nutritional status would be the most useful for nutritional targeting as well as monitoring of the effect of particular projects designed to improve nutrition through food security.

Therefore, the central question we attempt to answer in this work is the following: How well are the existing measures of household food security correlated with the underlying nutritional status of children? If they are correlated, is it possible to rank these measures in terms of this degree of correlation?

The proposed question is both novel and policy relevant. It is novel because the idea that these food security measures could and perhaps also should be evaluated based on the degree of useful information they carry on nutritional status has not received serious consideration from academics or policymakers. Even if it has received attention from some quarters, the lack of appropriate data has stymied any effort to convert this curiosity into serious empirical work. Our work has been possible due to a number of new surveys that enable us (a) to construct multiple household-level food security measures for the same population and (b) to observe the anthropometric health indicators for children in the same households.

This work is also highly policy relevant because food security is often not an end in itself. To the extent that food security is seen as an input into better nutrition, information on which measure of food security carries the most information on nutritional status will help shape the discussion on the kind of data that should be collected to monitor and track progress on these outcomes and better target appropriate assistance. It is worthwhile for researchers and policymakers to consider the strengths and limitations of each indicator. While there already exists adequate knowledge on the cost and time effectiveness of some of these indicators, the objective of this work is to supplement that with a ranking based on an additional dimension, namely, the degree of association with the underlying nutritional status.

Our methodology consists of a series of ordinary least square regressions specified under two broad regimes. The first regime is a parsimonious specification and includes only the food security measures (one at a time) and the geographical variables (urban/rural and regions). The rationale for doing this is that the crudest form of nutritional targeting – or the first approximation that may exist in any country – is often based on geography. The question we are essentially asking and answering with these specifications then is how these food security indicators compare in terms of providing a higher resolution to the targeting lens over and beyond any geographical targeting that may already exist. This will help us 4