ZEF Colloquium on Does food security matter for well-being? Evidence from a cross-country panel
February 11, 2021 | 14:30 h - 15:30 h
We invite you to the next ZEF colloquium on Thursday 11 February at 1:30 pm CET.
Please, see below the Zoom link. Note that registration is required - you will be redirected to the registration page by clicking on the link. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Speaker: Lukas Kornher (ZEF)
Title: Does food security matter for well-being? Evidence from a cross-country panel.
This study analyses the welfare impacts of food insecurity between 2005-2017, which was characterized by the period of high international food price fluctuations between 2007 and 2011, using a cross-country panel from the Gallup World Poll. Different from the conventional economics literature, which equates welfare with consumption-based utility neglecting psychological effects through uncertainty and fear of the future, we consider changes in subjective well-being as the welfare indicator. Studying several food security indicators within a comparative analysis across different country groupings, we contribute to the literature in the field of happiness economics and provide new insights on the relationship between food security and well-being in different contexts. Specifically, we find that food insecurity matters for well-being, particularly in low income, food-importing, and drought-affected countries. This relationship holds for both the prevalence of undernourishment and self-reported experienced food insecurity, which we found is associated with food supply and food price inflation. In addition to that, we devise the food supply gap as an indicator for relative food deprivation at the country level. A greater food supply gap was associated with lower well-being in low and middle-income countries as well as in countries that have a relatively equal or relatively unequal income distribution.
Register for Zoom Meeting: https://uni-bonn.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEqcO2orTsvG9as2T0-3GD-5RkjaFkxcWsd
Meeting ID: 957 7403 0512
Passcode: 433917
