World Food Policy Volume/Issue 2-2/3-1 Fall 2015/Spring 2016 | Page 87

World Food Policy

expenditure shares among the four groups
which suggest that differences may exist
in the quality of food assuming positive
income elasticity for food expenditures,
i.e., as households get better off, their
absolute expenditures on food increase.
Also, no difference can be observed
in sanitation parameters, neither on
household nor village level. However,
a marked difference can be observed in
children who were reported sick. Also,
undernourished children tend to have
mothers with fewer years of education.

Marked differences exist between
poor and nonpoor households, e.g., in
labor allocation, poor households are
more agriculturally based and nonpoor
households have a higher share of wage
employment and small-scale business.
Furthermore, differences also exist
in sanitary conditions, e.g., nonpoor
households have better access to water and
better hygienic conditions. Furthermore,
poor households tend to live in remote
mountainous areas. However, differences
between households with underweight
and normal weighted children for both
income groups (poor and nonpoor)
are small. Overall, the shares of
undernourished children among poor
households are about 1:2, whereas it is
about 1:5 in nonpoor households.

Further analysis using this dataset
for a Tobit model for the four household
groups (Waibel and Hohfeld 2015)
showed that the factors that influence
nutrition outcomes, measured as
Z-scores of the weight-for-age indicator,
are poverty status and income, mother’s
height, mother’s education, migration
status of the mother, and sanitation status
of the household. Most importantly,
regression coefficients of respective

variables differ by poverty status. Hence,
nonmonetary factors are important
entry points to reduce undernutrition
and, therefore, monetary poverty
reduction is not a sufficient condition for
eliminating food insecurity. This finding
is further underlined by a prediction of
future undernutrition rates based on the
regressions. Even under the assumption
of high growth, income growth alone will
not be able to reduce undernutrition to a
level of low severity until the year 2030
(Waibel and Hohfeld 2015).
Impact of food prices on food consumption
shares

This second case study shows
the impact of food prices on food
consumption shares. From September
2006 to June 2008, the international
prices of food commodities increased
dramatically, driving the food price index
to an unprecedented peak since 1975.
Compared to 2005, the food price index
increased by ~80%, driven mainly by
increasing cereal prices, which increased
by 230%.

In Figure 1, the effect of food prices
on the distributions of food consumption
shares are shown for rural households in
Thailand and Vietnam using the same
panel data from the six provinces as
described previously. The data in Figure
1 show the frequency distribution of
household food consumption shares in
2007 and 2010, i.e., before and after the
food price and economic crisis. The data
from some 4,000 households are taken
from the consumption module of the
household questionnaire. As shown, after
the economic crisis, the distributions
shifted to the right for both countries.
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