How Governments Can Stop Hunger
An Analysis of Political-Institutional Determinants of Food
Security in Developing Countries
Frank van Moock
Student number: 10001978
frankvanmoock@gmail.com
Supervisor: dr. S.J. Lim
Second reader: dr. S. Tanaka
University of Amsterdam
Master Thesis Political Science
International Relations
June 24, 2016
Abstract
Using data on 80 countries, this thesis examines the political-institutional determinants of food security in developing countries, and thereby fills the empirical gap in the existing literature. In specific, the impact of gender equality and education will be assessed. By constructing composite indices for the three dimensions of food security (availability, access, and utilization), the impact of these political-institutional factors can be determined more specifically. This thesis finds no empirical support for the theoretical expectation that gender equality improves food security in developing countries. However, this thesis does find that the level of education of a country has a positive effect on food security. These findings suggest that policies directed at improving food security through gender equality are not optimal and are expected to have more effect when focusing on improving the level of education.
Contents
1 Introduction 4 2 Literature Review 5 3 Theory 9 3.1 Gender equality . . . 9 3.2 Education . . . 12 4 Methodology 134.1 Constructing Composite Indices . . . 14 4.2 Food Security Indicators . . . 15 4.3 Estimation Strategy . . . 19 5 Results 19 5.1 Gender Equality . . . 20 5.2 Education . . . 25 5.3 Other Findings . . . 30 6 Conclusion 31 References 33
A List of countries in the dataset 37
B List of included variables 38
List of Figures
1 Schematic representation of the concept of food security Source: Author . . . 6
2 A schematic overview of the food systems approach. Source: Ingram, 2011 . . 7
3 Composite indices compared to the Global Food Security Index (EIU, 2015) 16 4 Population growth and gender equality . . . 20
5 Gender equality and availability in democracies (grey) and autocracies (black) 21 6 Female labour participation and acces per country . . . 23
7 Primary enrolment ratio and availability . . . 27
8 Education and utilization in Sub-Saharan Africa (grey) and other regions (black) . . . 29
List of Tables
1 Overview of the Reviewed Literature . . . 92 Theoretical Expectations. . . 13
3 Availability Indicators . . . 17
4 Access Indicators . . . 18
5 Utilization Indicators . . . 19
6 Gender Equality and Availability . . . 21
7 Female Labour Participation and Access . . . 23
8 Gender Equality and Access . . . 24
9 Gender Equality and Utilization . . . 25
10 Education and Availability. . . 27
11 Education and Access . . . 28
12 Education and Utilization . . . 29
13 Infrastructure and Food Security . . . 30
14 Corruption, Ease of Business, and Availability . . . 31
15 Included Countries per Region . . . 37
17 Gender Equality and Availability (No Regional FE). . . 40
18 Education and Availability (Controlled for democracy) . . . 40
1
Introduction
One of the most pressing development issues is the persistence of hunger in the world. It is es-timated that there are still 795 million people in the world living in hunger, around 10 percent of the global population (FAO, 2015). Between regions, differences are large. In Southern-Asia around 12 percent of the population suffers from hunger. In Sub-Saharan Africa this is 23 percent and, more specifically, in countries in Middle-Africa, around 41 percent of the pop-ulation is undernourished. Reducing hunger is difficult because it, apart from there being enough food, requires people to be able to af-ford food as well as utilize food in a way that supports an active lifestyle. The concept of food security deals with these different aspects as it consists of three dimensions: availability, access, and utilization.
In addition to the existing problems with food security, it is expected that food security in the developing world will come under even more pressure in the future (Misselhorn et al., 2012). On the supply side, climate change is expected to hurt the agricultural production due to an increase of extreme weather phe-nomena such as droughts or floods. For devel-oping countries it is estimated that the agri-cultural productivity may decline by 9 to 21 percent by 2050 as a result of climate change (Fischer, Shah, Tubiello, & Van Velhuizen, 2005; Cline, 2007). Furthermore, apart from possible positive effects, opening up the devel-oping world to global markets could make those countries more vulnerable to adverse effects of globalization such as global economic crises, in-creased competition, and higher volatility in food prices (Misselhorn et al., 2012). Addi-tionally, the increasing use of biofuels causes a shift in the use of agricultural land away from the production of food crops, presenting an-other threat to the supply of food in developing countries.
On the demand side, population growth in developing countries is expected to increase the demand for food. It is suggested that by 2050, global food production will need to increase by 70 to 100 percent to keep up with demand
(World Bank, 2008). For developed countries, the threats to supply and demand of food secu-rity are less of an issue because these countries are able to absorb them and food security in those countries is part of a broader net of so-cial security (Timmer, 2005).
The problems with hunger and the vulnera-bilities in the developing world show that im-proving food security is a topic that deserves a lot of attention from both academics and policy makers. Research on food security is predomi-nantly emphasized on increasing crop produc-tivity and other agronomic factors (e.g. Lal, 2004; Garrity et al., 2010; Tscharntke et al., 2012). It is argued that the dominance of this field has overshadowed many other important aspects that are crucial in determining food security (Ingram, 2011). This thesis aims to improve the understanding of food security by looking at other factors that shape food secu-rity. In specific, this thesis will examine the political-institutional determinants of food se-curity in the developing world. With political-institutional determinants, this thesis refers to factors that can be influenced by governments of developing countries through changes in pol-icy. This implies that global factors such as climate change are excluded from the analysis. In addition to the academic interest in im-proving food security, policy makers in the de-veloped world often recognize improving food security as one of the important areas for de-velopment policy (e.g European Commission, n.d.; Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2016). The attention from the international commu-nity can partly be explained by the idea that from the perspective of the developed world, improving food security is considered to be a moral obligation as well as an economic imper-ative. The moral obligation is formalized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights where the right to food is protected in article 25 (UN, 2016). In an address at the 2012 G8 summit, President Obama emphasized that food secu-rity, apart from being a moral obligation, also is an economic imperative (Obama, 2012). He argued that history shows that the most ef-fective way to ”pull people and entire nations out of poverty is to invest in their agriculture”
(Obama, 2012). The increasing development that would follow from improving food security in the developing world would open up those countries to the global markets. As such, de-veloped countries could could reap the benefits of this and thus have a self interest in improv-ing food security across the world.
It could be argued that this way of look-ing at food security represents a predominantly ’Western’ perspective due to the focus on hu-man rights and economic gains. This perspec-tive is also represented by the policy of de-veloped nations aimed at improving food se-curity in the developing world. For instance, the Dutch government stresses the importance of gender equality, improving the business en-vironment, and opening up countries to global markets in order to improve the food security (Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2013). The European Commission emphasizes the role of education in improving food security. The fo-cus on these issues could reflect the popular support for improving such values. As such, in addition to contributing to the academic lit-erature on food security, this thesis will test whether the factors identified by policy makers in the developed world are in fact important for shaping food security in the developing world. From the review of existing literature on the topic, two specific factors are identified as be-ing the most important political-institutional drivers of food security: gender equality and education. Therefore, the analysis in this thesis is focused on these two factors and the impact of these factors on food security. This analy-sis will conanaly-sist of a quantitative cross-country analysis of data on 80 developing countries. Because food security consists of three sepa-rate dimensions: availability, access, and uti-lization, three indices are constructed to mea-sure these dimensions.
Based on a theoretical analysis, it is assumed that both gender equality and education have a positive effect on food security in the devel-oping world. Even though the empirical find-ings of this thesis support these expectations for the impact of education, only limited em-pirical support is found for the positive impact of gender equality on food security.
The structure of this thesis is as follows. Sec-tion 2 is used to present the concept of food security as well as providing an overview of the existing literature on political-institutional de-terminants of food security. The next section is dedicated to a theoretical discussion of the political-institutional determinants of food se-curity and present several hypotheses. The fol-lowing section, Section 4, will cover the data and methodology used. Section 5 will present the results of the analysis. The final section, Section 6 concludes and discusses the findings.
2
Literature Review
Because of the academic interest in the concept of food security, a vast body of literature exists on this subject. However, for the analysis of the political-institutional drivers of food secu-rity, not all of the existing literature is relevant. To limit the scope of this review, only stud-ies that look at political-institutional determi-nants of food security are included. This in-cludes literature that deals with determinants of food security that can be influenced by pol-icy. This implies that studies that deal with en-vironmental issues such as climate change will be excluded. Furthermore, this thesis will not focus on economic determinants of food secu-rity. Before going into the literature on the political-institutional drivers, the concept itself needs to be conceptualized.
As mentioned in the introduction, food secu-rity is a broad concept entailing many aspects, ranging from the economics behind food pro-duction to medical facets of a nutritious diet. These aspects come together in the definition set forward by the Food and Agriculture Orga-nization of the United Nations (FAO): “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996). This def-inition contains four dimensions of food secu-rity that are often identified: availability, ac-cess, utilization, and stability (e.g. Timmer, 2000; Yu, You, & Fan, 2009; Qureshi, Dixon, & Wood, 2015). The first dimension, the
avail-ability of food, relates to there being suffi-cient food available of good quality. As such, the availability dimension covers the supply of food but also the quality of the supplied food. The second dimension, the access dimension, refers to the affordability and allocation of food (Qureshi et al., 2015). This implies that house-holds should have sufficient income to obtain food as well as that there should be the pos-sibility to use the income to obtain food. As such, the level of poverty in a country is a di-rect indicator of problems with the access to food in a country. The third dimension deals with the utilization of food through an ade-quate diet, water, sanitation, and health care (UDSA, 1996, p. 2). As such, utilization looks at the use of food as a means of pursuing an active and healthy lifestyle and thus focuses on the nutritional value derived from food. The fi-nal dimension refers to the stability of food se-curity over time (Qureshi et al., 2015). It adds a temporal element to the other dimensions. This implies that the stability dimension is not sufficient to explain food security but stabil-ity of the other dimensions is required for food security. Because of this, the stability dimen-sion will not be discussed separately but rather is incorporated into the other dimensions. A schematic overview of the concept of food secu-rity as used in this thesis is presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Schematic representation of the concept of food security Source: Author
The dimensions of food security are not iso-lated from each other. For instance, for the access to food it is required that sufficient food
is available and for the utilization of food there needs to be access to food. As such, the dimen-sions could also be seen as a scale on which the availability is the most aggregated level and the utilization the most specific. Despite this relationship, using the different dimen-sions helps with analysing the determinants of food security because each of the dimensions focuses on a different aspect of the concept. The multidimensional character, thus, offers a detailed framework for assessing the political-institutional determinants of food security.
Food security can be examined at differ-ent levels of analysis. A difference exists be-tween food security at global, regional, na-tional, household, and individual levels. The first three levels cover macro-factors such as production and trade whereas the household and individual levels represent micro-factors such as household income and dietary pref-erences (Ecker, Breisinger, et al., 2012). A distinction can be made between the levels at which food security manifests itself (which re-fer to the dependent variable in this analysis) and the levels at which the drivers of food se-curity are to be sought (which refer to the in-dependent variables). Food security manifests itself most profoundly at the individual and household levels. This is due to the impor-tance of, for insimpor-tance, household access to food and the individual nutritional demands. Ac-cording to Paarlberg the main drivers of food security should be sought at the national level (Paarlberg, 2002). However, because of for in-stance globalization and climate change, the drivers of food security have an increasingly regional and global character (McKeon, 2011). Because this thesis aims to examine the impact of political-institutional factors on developing countries, the focus will lie on the national, household, and individual levels of analysis. Furthermore, the dimensions of food security also represent these different levels of analysis. The availability dimension mainly deals with the national level, the access dimension deals predominantly with the household level, and the utilization with the individual level.
In order to discuss the determinants of food security, a food systems approach is used
Figure 2: A schematic overview of the food systems approach. Source: Ingram, 2011
(Ingram, 2011). This approach helps to under-stand the multidimensional concept and how it is affected through various mechanisms. A schematic overview of this approach is pre-sented in Figure 2. Most directly, food security is affected by, so called, food system activities such as production and consumption. In ad-dition, food security is affected by social- and environmental welfare. Effects dealing with the social welfare are central to this thesis because they directly represent factors that can be in-fluenced through policy such as income, em-ployment, wealth, and human capital. Later in this section literature on these political-institutional determinants will be discussed.
As mentioned in the introduction, there are also external drivers that shape food security such as, for instance, demographical changes. These drivers are not central to the analy-sis because they do not represent political-institutional factors that can be influenced directly by policy. However, these external drivers do play an important role in shaping food security in the developing world and as such need to be taken into account in the anal-ysis.
The global population is expected to increase by 47 percent between 2000 and 2050 and a large part of this growth is concentrated in developing countries (Misselhorn et al., 2012). Increasing demand for food resulting from this growth will put pressure on the food security. It is estimated that by 2050 global food pro-duction needs to increase by 70 to 100 percent to keep up with rising demand (World Bank, 2008). As such, population growth is argued to be an important driver of the food security in a country. Another driver of food security is the availability of natural resources and the health of the ecosystem, referred to as the nat-ural capital of a country. Since countries with lower natural capital face more constraints in increasing their food production, the natural capital is argued to be a driver of the availabil-ity of food (Barron, Tharme, & Herrero, n.d.). Another driver which is not considered to be political-institutional but that is important for the food security in developing countries, is the economic development. Breisinger et al. (2010) even argue that economic growth is the single most important driver of food security. In order to account for impact of demographic
changes, natural capital, and economic devel-opment on food security, these factors will be included in the analysis as control variables (a discussion of the methods used will be pre-sented in Section 4).
Now that food security has been conceptu-alized, the literature on political-institutional determinants of food security will be discussed. This review serves as an overview of the exist-ing research on the topic as well as a way to identify the gaps in the academic literature. No studies have been found that deal with political-institutional determinants of food se-curity in the way set out by this paper. How-ever, several studies have been found that deal with determinants of food security that can be regarded as political-insitutional. These stud-ies can be divided into two groups. The first set of studies is of a conceptual nature and lacks empirical support. The second set of stud-ies consists of empirical investigation into the political-institutional drivers of food security.
The study of Ecker et al. (2012) provides a conceptual framework of food security in which the authors discuss several drivers of food security, including political-institutional drivers. The authors stress the importance of factors that go beyond agriculture and the household level in explaining food security out-comes. They argue that the crucial role of ed-ucation in shaping food security has often been underemphasized (Ecker et al., 2012). Further-more, it is argued that gender equality in de-cision making on household resource allocation is crucial for the nutritional status of young children in particular and that gender equality in general plays an important role in improv-ing food security. The authors also state that improving infrastructure is important for shap-ing food security in the developshap-ing world be-cause it not only reduces the production costs of food, but also increase the people’s access to health and education services (Ecker et al., 2012). The idea that education and infrastruc-ture are important for shaping food security is shared by Rosegrant and Cline (2003). Of the conceptual studies examined, the study by Qureshi et al. (2015) is the most interesting as it directly discusses public policies for
improv-ing food security. The authors argue that poli-cies to improve food security should be directed at improving education, empowering women, improving the business environment, and im-proving (rural) infrastructure (Qureshi et al., 2015). However, similar to the other articles mentioned, this study does not provide an em-pirical investigation of the mentioned drivers of food security.
In addition to the conceptual articles on the political-institutional determinants of food se-curity, three empirical studies have been found. The first study provides a qualitative assess-ment of policy options to improve the food se-curity in South Australia (Bastian & Coveney,
2012). Based on interviews with 24 food
security stakeholders, the authors come up with a list of forty-four “potential policy op-tions for the South Australian government to improve food security” (Bastian & Coveney, 2012). These policy options range from in-creasing the land used for food production to increasing the number of Aboriginal nutrition and health workers. In line with the concep-tual articles, this study acknowledges the im-portance of education and infrastructure as ar-eas where improvements could benefit food se-curity (Bastian & Coveney, 2012). Further-more, they argue that food security can be im-proved by, for instance, changing land alloca-tion and providing financial aid to agricultural research organizations. With the wide range of policy suggestions, the study offers an inter-esting insight in how Australia could improve its food security. However, because the focus of this thesis lies on food security in developing countries and the analysis is solely based on in-terviews with stakeholders, the study does not offer a satisfying empirical analysis of political-institutional drivers of food security.
The study by Gali`e (2013) does provide an empirical analysis of these drivers. In specific, the study focuses on food security in three Syr-ian villages (prior to the civil war) by looking at the distribution of seeds amongst the popu-lation. The authors emphasize, based on their small-n study, that because women are the pri-mary food producers in those villages, improv-ing gender equality could contribute to
“en-Table 1: Overview of the Reviewed Literature
Source Country/Region Type of Article /
Method Used
Political-Institutional drivers of food security
Ecker and Breisinger (2012) - Conceptual Education, Gender Equality, and
Infrastructure
Rosegrant and Cline (2003) - Conceptual Education and Infrastructure
Qureshi et al. (2015) - Conceptual Education, Infrastructure, Gender
Equality, and Business Environment
Bastian and Coveney (2011) South Australia Interviews Infrastructure and Education
Gali (2013) Syria Interviews and
Household Surveys Gender Equality
De Cock et al. (2013) Limpopo Province, South-Africa
Multivariate analysis
and interviews Education and Gender Equality
hancing household food security in small scale farming” (Gali`e, 2013).
The most extensive empirical analysis found that deals with political-institutional determi-nants of food security is a case study of South-Africa’s Limpopo Province (De Cock et al., 2013). The goal of that study was not nec-essarily to analyse the determinants of food se-curity but rather to provide an overview of the food security situation of rural households. Us-ing multivariate analysis of data obtained usUs-ing household surveys on 599 households and inter-views with the population, De Cock et al. iden-tified household characteristics that shaped the food security outcomes. Based on their regres-sion analysis the authors find that the most important drivers of the food security situ-ation deal with the locsitu-ation, human capital (such as education), and the household income (De Cock et al., 2013). These findings support the earlier mentioned studies.
Overall, several studies exist that deal with political-institutional determinants of food se-curity. However, these studies are limited in the sense that it is primarily of a conceptual nature or focused on specific countries. A schematic overview of the reviewed literature is presented in Table 1. Common among the reviewed studies is the importance of gender equality, education, and infrastructure in shap-ing food security outcomes. The cross-country analysis central to this thesis will therefore
fo-cus on gender equality and education to exam-ine the political-institutional determinants of food security. Infrastructure will be included in the analysis although the discussion will be less extensive. The reason for this is to narrow down the research. In addition, arguably, gen-der equality and education better fit the def-inition of political-institutional factors. Fur-thermore, gender equality and education play an important role in the development policy of developed countries and focusing on these factors thus allows for analysing such policies. The quantitative analysis presented in this the-sis thus contributes to the academic literature by providing a cross-country analysis and con-tributes to the policy debate on improving food security in the developing world.
3
Theory
In this section, a theoretical discussion on the impact of gender equality and education on food security in the developing world will be presented. The insights from this section will be used to construct several hypotheses which will be tested in Section 5.
3.1
Gender equality
As identified by the literature on food secu-rity, gender equality is an important factor in
shaping food security in the developing world. This is supported by the over-representation of women in the hunger statistics. It is estimated that worldwide, around 60 percent of under-nourished people are female (World Food Pro-gramme, 2005, p. 5). In order to improve the food security situation of women, it is argued that the responsibility lies with states to im-prove the human rights position of women in general and rights of women at work in spe-cific (Asian Development Bank, 2013). This thesis will assess the impact of gender equal-ity on food securequal-ity in developing countries. However, before doing so the theoretical ex-pectations about this relation will need to be formed.
As mentioned earlier, food security in the de-veloping world is vulnerable due to the impact of for instance climate change and economic crises. It is argued that the negative impact of these trends will be larger for women than for men (Asian Development Bank, 2013). Cli-mate change, for instance, will have a larger impact on the food security of women than on that of men because of the large share of women among small-scale food producers in developing countries as well as because of the unequal bargaining position of women within households (Asian Development Bank, 2013). In India, for example, 55 percent of live-stock farming labour is performed by women (RNCOS, 2006). Small-scale food production is vulnerable to the adverse effects of global warming because of the limited ability to cope with production losses. Furthermore, because of discriminatory practices against women in developing countries, female small-scale food producers face even more difficulties when deal-ing with production losses resultdeal-ing from cli-mate change (Asian Development Bank, 2013). When it comes to human capital issues, men are preferred over women in a lot of devel-oping countries. In Bangladesh, for instance, 62 percent of the population beliefs that going to university is more important for sons than for daughters (SIGI, 2016). When coping with financial difficulties, households are found to reduce education-related expenses by remov-ing girls from school first (Bj¨orkman, 2006).
Furthermore, women are argued to suffer more from economic crises due to women being over-represented in the pool of unskilled labourers in export-dependent sectors in developing coun-tries (Heltberg, Hossain, & Reva, 2012, p.34). When countries face economic crises, export-dependent sectors are often the most severely hit and as such those employed in those sectors are more likely to get fired. Overall, there is sufficient evidence to argue that the food secu-rity of women in developing countries is more vulnerable than that of men. This vulnera-bility implies that gender equality can play a crucial role in improving the food security in developing countries. The impact of gender equality is expected to be different for each of the dimensions of food security.
For the availability of food, especially eco-nomic gender equality is expected to be an im-portant factor. In this regard the role of women as agricultural producers is relevant. For agri-cultural production, it is important to have access to the required production inputs such as finance and fertilizers. In countries where women have an economically weaker position, the access to these inputs for female farmers can be limited. When looking at the access of smallholders to credit, it is found that in most countries the share of female smallholders who can access credit is around 5 to 10 percent lower than for male smallholders (FAO, 2010, p.34). For technical inputs such as pesticides it is also found that male farmers have more ac-cess than female farmers (Peterman, Behrman, & Quisumbing, 2010, p.6). This difference is particularly important for food production in the developing world because of the increasing share of female farmers in developing countries in the past decades (Asian Development Bank, 2013). In Pakistan around 30 percent of farm-ers are currently female, three times as much as 30 years earlier, and in Bangladesh around 50 percent of farmers is female (FAO, 2010, p. 9). It is argued that if male and female farm-ers would have similar access to intputs, the agricultural yields are very similar (Udry, Hod-dinott, Alderman, & Haddad, 1995). The FAO even states that “if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could
in-crease yields on their farms by 20-30 percent.” (FAO, 2010, p.40). As such it can be argued that improving the access of women to agricul-tural inputs is expected to increase agriculagricul-tural production, which leads to a greater availabil-ity of food. In addition to the access to agri-cultural inputs, women in developing countries also have more problems with obtaining control over land (Asian Development Bank, 2013). In this regard cultural issues play an important role. In developing countries women often face more restrictions in obtaining land. Especially the acquisition of land through inheritance is a problem because of cultural norms that ben-efit the position of males (Asian Development Bank, 2013). Overall, the availability of food is argued to improve when women have simi-lar access to agricultural inputs and face less restrictions in obtaining land.
When looking at the access dimension of food security, which deals with the affordabil-ity and allocation of food, the economic and cultural position of women in a country is also argued to be an important driver. In coun-tries with more gender equality, women are ex-pected to have more access to food due to them having more economic means to afford food, ei-ther with income derived through employment or through redistributive mechanisms (Asian Development Bank, 2013). This would imply that countries where female labour participa-tion is higher, the access to food is greater. Re-distributive mechanisms can also improve the access to food. However, in countries where men are culturally and economically favoured over women, it is argued that food safety nets and other social protection schemes benefit men over women (Asian Development Bank, 2013). In addition to the importance of eco-nomic means to afford food, the bargaining po-sition of women within households and society as a whole can also play a role for the access to food. Patel (2012) argues that if women in a country have less power (for instance in politics or business) than men, this directly translated into weaker access to food. This is supported by evidence from a study on the effects of the female bargaining position within households on outcomes such as income, health, and child
development (Doss, 2013). For example, in households in South-Asia, women often eat the least and sometimes eat the leftovers after the other family members have eaten (UNESCAP, 2009). Women with a stronger bargaining po-sition, which directly relates to their cultural position, are thus found to have more access to food. Overall, it is expected that in countries where women have a stronger cultural and eco-nomic position, women are better able to afford and access food.
The utilization dimension deals with the ability of the body to metabolize food (Gross, Schoeneberger, Pfeifer, Preuss, et al., 2000). Adequate utilization of food is important for everyone but arguably more important for women. This is because of the importance of good nutrition for pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers for the mental- and physi-cal development of children (Alderman, Hod-dinott, & Kinsey, 2006; Bhutta et al., 2008; Meinzen-Dick, Behrman, Menon, & Quisumb-ing, 2012). If children at young age have problems with acquiring the required nutrition, this could lead to lifelong mental- and physical problems. As such, problems with the develop-ment of children are a signal of problems with the utilization of food. Increased female labour participation is expected to improve the uti-lization of food because of the effect through the access to food mentioned before. However, a study found that increasing employment of women also causes a shift from nutritious di-ets to more time-saving foods which are often less nutritious (Senauer, Sahn, & Alderman, 1986). However, in the poorest countries this effect is marginalized due to there not being sufficient food available and thus rising house-hold income due to increased labour partici-pation is expected to improve the access and utilization of food. In addition to the impact of employment on the utilization of food, the cultural changes are also expected to have ben-eficial effects. Several studies on the subject found that if women have more control over the household income, the incomes are allo-cated more in favour of health, education, and nutrition (Pitt, Khandker, Chowdhury, & Mil-limet, 2003; Quisumbing & Maluccio, 2003). In
addition, there is evidence that in agricultural households, women are more likely to favour food crops that ensure food security for the family whilst men are more likely to favour cash crops (FAO, IFAD, and ILO, 2010, p. 13). Combining these insights leads to the expec-tation that improving the cultural position of women would lead to better utilization of food in developing countries.
Overall, there is sufficient theoretical evi-dence to assume that improving gender equal-ity would lead to greater food securequal-ity in devel-oping countries. Based on these insights, four hypotheses have been constructed.
H1: In developing countries where women face less constraints in obtaining means of production, the availability of food is greater.
H2: Access to food is greater in developing countries where the female labour participation is higher.
H3: Developing countries where women
have a stronger economic and cultural position, the access to food is greater.
H4: Utilization of food is better in develop-ing countries where women have a stronger eco-nomic and cultural position.
3.2
Education
In addition to the impact of gender equality on food security, this thesis looks as the impact of education. In general it is expected that coun-tries with a better education system are more food secure. According to Rosegrant and Cline (2003), improvements in education are essen-tial to accelerate food security development be-cause of the impact of education on produc-tivity, income, and human development. The close relationship between education and food security is also supported by strong correla-tions between the level of human capital, which includes the level of education, and measures of agricultural productivity, household income, and nutritional outcomes (FAO, 2010). Per dimension, the theoretical expectations about
the impact of education on food security will be discussed.
For the availability dimension, education can be an important determinant due to the effect on productivity. In general, it is argued that raising the quality of basic education enables people to live more productive lives (Nanok, Taylor, Tollens, & Vandenbosch, 2005). More specifically, education is argued to stimulate agricultural productivity because farmers with higher education are more likely to adopt ad-vanced technologies (World Bank, 1990). Pri-mary education is also argued to improve the agricultural productivity, especially in rural ar-eas. Completing the first four years of for-mal schooling is found to increase the agri-cultural productivity with around 7.4 percent (Lockheed, Jamison, & Lau, 1980). Due to the impact of education on productivity, it is ex-pected that countries with larger shares of the population being educated are more food se-cure. It specifically is expected that countries with a larger percentage of people in secondary and tertiary1 education have higher
agricul-tural productivity due to the use of advanced technologies.
Education is also expected to influence the access to food through the impact on household incomes. There is found to be a strong correla-tion between the level of educacorrela-tion of a family and the household income level (Boshara, Em-mons, & Noeth, 2015). As such, Boshara et al. (2015) state that ”rising educational attain-ment over time has contributed much to fam-ilies’ and the nation’s advancement ”. House-holds with higher incomes are better able to afford food and as such should be able to reduce their food expenditure. In addition, education is found to affect the access to food due to the impact on poverty. It is found that providing the relevant basic education can reduce poverty in rural areas (Nanok et al., 2005). An expla-nation for this effect is that education reduces the illiteracy and improves numeracy. Overall, it is expected that the access to food benefits from better education due to the impact on the 1In general, secondary education deals with
educa-tion at a high school level. Tertiary educaeduca-tion refers to all education following the secondary education such as colleges and universities.
household income.
In addition to the impact of education on the availability and access dimensions, it is ex-pected that education also affects the utiliza-tion of food. Educautiliza-tion is argued to play an important role in the household awareness of nutritional and safety aspects of food (Qureshi et al., 2015). For the development of children, which has been identified as an indicator for the utilization of food, the educational level and nutritional knowledge of parents is found to be an important factor (Ecker et al., 2012). Research on the impact of maternal and pater-nal education on child development found that greater levels of formal education are associ-ated with decreased odds of stunting2 (Semba
et al., 2008). Studies conducted amongst 5,000 children in Bangladesh (Rahman & Chowd-hury, 2007) and 18,000 children in the Phillip-ines (Ricci & Becker, 1996) found that espe-cially paternal education has proven to be an important determinant of child stunting. This is mainly due to the fact that higher educated fathers earn more money and are more likely to marry women of comparable educational levels (Semba et al., 2008). Other studies found that the educational level of mothers is important for raising the the overall welfare of children en therefore the utilization of food (Behrman & Wolfe, 1984; Glewwe, 1999). If girls learn about basic health and hygienic practices, they can teach this to their children once they be-come mothers (Mukudi, 2003). This is espe-cially relevant for developing countries because of the large role of women as caretakers in households. Overall, education is expected to improve the utilization of food. Especially im-portant is the impact of education on the nu-tritional knowledge of the population.
When considering the dimensions of food se-curity, education is expected to have a positive effect on all of the dimensions. Because educa-tion improves the agricultural productivity, it is expected that the availability increases. The impact on the access to food is expected to be greater due to the impact of education on the 2Stunting is the failure in the growth of children due
to poor nutrition and infections and is associated with poor cognitive, motor, and socioemotional development (Semba et al., 2008).
household income. Furthermore, education is assumed to increase the utilization of food be-cause of increased knowledge of nutrition and health.
H5: The availability of food is greater in developing countries with a better educational system.
H6: Access to food is greater in developing countries with a better educational system.
H7: Utilization of food is better in develop-ing countries with a better educational system.
Based on the discussed theories it can be as-sumed that both improving the gender equality and the educational system in developing coun-tries will improve food security across all three dimensions. The first four hypotheses repre-sent the theoretical expectations for the impact of gender equality. The other three hypotheses represent the expected positive impact of the educational system on food security in develop-ing countries. Table 2 provides an overview of the theoretical expectations presented in this section. In Section 5, the hypotheses will be tested using data on 80 developing countries.
Table 2: Theoretical Expectations
Gender Equality Education Availability Access to means
of production (+) Productivity (+) Access Household income (+)
Bargaining position (+) Household income (+) Utilization Household budget
allocation (+)
Nutritional knowledge (+)
4
Methodology
In this section the data and methods will be discussed. First, the construction of the com-posite indices used to measure the dimensions of food security will be discussed. This will be followed by a the operationalization of the
concept. The third part is used to present the estimation strategy and the baseline model.
The dataset used consists of data on 80 de-veloping countries. Countries are considered to be developing based on the categorization by the International Monetary Fund (2015). This categorization is used because of its wide application in academic research. Table 15 in appendix A presents the list of countries in-cluded in the dataset per region. Using the IMF categorization means that some countries that could be considered developed countries, such as Poland and arguably Saudi-Arabia, are included in the dataset. However, including these countries is not expected to bias the re-sults of the analysis. In addition to the ex-clusion of developed countries, countries with a population size smaller than one million are excluded from the dataset for practical reasons.
4.1
Constructing Composite
In-dices
In order to test the hypotheses and to anal-yse the impact of political-institutional deter-minants on food security, the three dimensions need to be operationalized. This will be done by constructing three separate composite dices. The main benefit of using composite in-dices is that it can summarise complex, multi-dimensional concepts into a single indicator (OECD, 2008). This makes is a useful tool for measuring food security. Furthermore, work-ing with composite indices is especially use-ful when dealing with policy, for it allows for a more simple comparison between countries when dealing with complex multidimensional concepts (OECD, 2008). However, using com-posite indices also has downsides. Most impor-tantly, if the indices are poorly constructed or misinterpreted it can lead to wrong conclusions (OECD, 2008). In addition, even if the indices are well-designed they may lead to simplistic (policy) conclusions because using a composite indicator reduces complex multi-dimensional concepts to one simple indicator. The OECD has published a handbook which can be used to improve the construction of composite in-dicators by minimizing the downsides (OECD,
2008). This handbook is used as a guide for constructing the indices used to measure the three dimensions of food security. A crucial part of this process is transparency about the decisions made. As such, this thesis will go over the process as set out by the OECD step-by-step in order to ensure this transparency.
The first, and most important, step is defin-ing the theoretical framework of the concept in which all the dimensions are discussed. This has been done in the literature review. Fur-thermore, it is required that the theoretical framework makes an identification of the selec-tion criteria of the indicators. For this thesis it is important to make the distinction between drivers of food security and food security out-comes. This distinction has been covered in the literature review and will be dealt with in depth when discussing the individual indica-tors of food security in Section 4.2.
The second step is the selection of the in-dicators based on the theoretical framework. ”Ideally, variables should be selected on the basis of their relevance, analytical soundness, timeliness, and accessibility” according to the OECD (2008). It is acknowledged that com-promises need to be made when constructing a composite index, which stresses the impor-tance of being transparent about these compro-mises. When measuring food security, a prac-tical problem that arises is the limited avail-ability of the data. As such, the selection of the variables is influenced by the availability of data. However, the used variables are primar-ily selected based on their analytical soundness. The selection of the indicators will be discussed further in Section 4.2.
The next step in constructing the indices, is to deal with the missing data in the dataset. In order to do so, several countries have been excluded from the dataset. One of the require-ments for the country selection in this thesis is that the countries should be included in the Global Food Security Index of the EIU (2015) because of the heavy reliance on that dataset. Furthermore, several countries have been omit-ted from the dataset because they lacked data on some of the other variables used to mea-sure food security. With the removal of these
countries from the dataset, there are no miss-ing values for the variables used in the com-posite index. This implies that no imputation was required and thereby the data has not been altered.
The fourth step required is an investigation of the interrelationship between the selected in-dicators. By doing so, the suitability of the data can be assessed and arbitrary selection of the variables can be prevented (OECD, 2008). For each of the dimensions of food security the relationship between the variables is examined using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). All of the selected indicators per dimension are found to be correlated to each other which im-plies that they all can be used to measure the same phenomenon.
The fifth step is to weigh and aggregate the indicators. As a weighing and aggrega-tion technique, this thesis uses factor analysis. More specifically, the function ci factor in the statistical software package R is used. The re-sulting composite indicators present values on a scale from 0 to 100, with higher values rep-resenting more food security. The benefit of using factor analysis is that the weights are based on the common element of the individ-ual variables used. This common element thus provides a good estimate of the dimension of food security that the variables are selected to measure.
Other weighing and aggregation techniques have been considered but they are not found to be satisfactory. For instance, the Mazziatto-Pareto Index (MPI) (Mazziotta & Mazziatto-Pareto, 2013) technique has been considered. The idea behind MPI is that in order to get a high aggre-gate score, all individual variables should score high and as such a penalty will be given to a country if it scores low in one of the variables. This implies that MPI does not allow for sub-stitution between variables. This is problem-atic for measuring food security because this substitutability is assumed to exist between the variables. In other words, a low score on one of the indicators for the availability of food does not automatically imply that a country is not food secure because the country could score high on other indicators of the availability of
food. In addition, the use of weighing all the variables equally has been tested but the sults where in general very similar to the re-sults of using factor analysis. As such, factor analysis is preferred to using equal weights be-cause of the statistical accountability, which is lacking when using equal weights.
To test whether the constructed indicators are indeed measuring food security correctly we can compare the indicators with an existing index for food security: the Global Food Se-curity Index (GFSI) (EIU, 2015). This index measures food security in three categories: af-fordability, availability, and quality and safety. The reason this thesis does not use the GFSI to measure food security is that these categories are different from the way the dimensions of food security are defined in this thesis. As such, the GFSI contains indicators that are not rel-evant for this thesis. Furthermore, the GFSI includes GDP per capita as a measure of the affordability of food whereas this thesis consid-ers GDP per capita to be an external driver of food security which is included to the model as a control variable. A high correlation between the dimensions of food security and the GFSI implies that the indices provide a measurement of food security. Figure 3 presents the rela-tionship between the dimensions of food secu-rity and the GFSI. The high correlation found makes sense because of the heavy reliance on the GFSI data in constructing the indices.
4.2
Food Security Indicators
Now that the method of constructing the in-dices has been discussed, the indicators used to measure food security are presented. When operationalizing food security, a distinction can be made between food security outcomes and food security drivers. An example of a food security outcome is the percentage of children with underweight in a country, as it directly measures the impact of nutrition. For the selec-tion of the indicators, a combinaselec-tion between outcomes and drivers will be used. This seems odd, given that the this thesis aims to explore the impact of specific drivers on the outcomes. However, some of the drivers of food security are useful for determining the food security
Figure 3: Composite indices compared to the Global Food Security Index (EIU, 2015)
outcomes because of their direct impact. For example, the level of poverty in a country can be seen as a driver of food security but despite this it is included as an indicator to measure the access to food. The reason for this is that a direct relationship exists between poverty and the access to food; people living in poverty are in general unable to afford the food required for an active lifestyle. The selection of indica-tors is primarily based on the theoretical dis-cussion in Section 2 as well as on several articles that deal with food security measurement (Yu et al., 2009; Headey & Ecker, 2013; Pangari-bowo, Gerber, & Torero, 2013).
Availability The first dimension of food se-curity, availability, measures the availability of sufficient food of high quality. In order to mea-sure this, a set of eight indicators has been se-lected. Table 3 provides an overview of the selected indicators.3 The first five indicators
of availability cover the aspect of the availabil-ity of sufficient food. The other indicators are used to measure the availability of high quality food.
The average food supply measures the amount of food available for human consump-tion in kcal per capita per day. A higher av-erage food supply is a direct measure of the 3A more detailed overview of all variables used in
this thesis is provided in Appendix 16.
availability of food in a country. Headey and Ecker (2013) argue that using calorie indicators have a downside because it ignores issues such as dietary diversity and micronutrient require-ments. For this reason, the availability index constructed in this thesis includes indicators that measure the availability of high quality food. A second indicator, the dependency on chronic food aid , measures whether a coun-try is recipient of food aid on a 0-2 scale with high values representing lower dependency on food aid. Reliance on external food donors sig-nals the existence of weaknesses in the food system (EIU, 2015). Countries that have to rely on foreign donors are expected to have in-sufficient production capacities to supply the domestic demand of food. In addition, the re-liance on donors means that the food availabil-ity is vulnerable because donors could limit the food donations. As such, dependency on food aid relates to lower availability of food. The third variable included represents the stability of the food availability: the existence of ad-equate crop storage facilities. This indica-tor is based on a qualitative assessment on with values of 0 representing insufficient crop stor-age facilities and values of 1 representing suf-ficient crop storage facilities. If a country has adequate crop storage facilities, food loss can be minimized and a buffer is provided against adverse shocks (EIU, 2015). As such,
coun-tries with sufficient crop storage facilities are assumes to be more food secure.
The agricultural productivity is measured by looking at the cereal yield in kilograms per hectare. A higher cereal yield signals higher agricultural productivity. A critique on this indicator is that it benefits countries that spe-cialize in cereal production opposed to other food crops. However, cereal products include a lot of staple foods in developing countries such as wheat, rice, and maize, which covers a large portion of the food production in the world. As such, it is not expected that this possible specialization will have a significant effect on the outcomes. An additional indicator used to measure the availability of food which is related to the productivity is the food loss between harvesting and distribution . This is mea-sured as the total food waste compared to the total domestic food supply in tonnes. Coun-tries with higher ratios of food loss will have to produce relatively more food to obtain the same supply. Higher ratios of food loss are thus a signal of ’deep-rooted’ structural problems in the supply chain and threaten the availability of food in a country (EIU, 2015).
The last three variables for the availabil-ity dimension measure the availabilavailabil-ity of high quality food. The dietary availability of animal iron provides such a measure. It mea-sures the average availability of iron in mg per capita per day and as such indicates the quality of the food supplied in a country. The protein quality indicator measures the grams of qual-ity proteins consumed and therefore also sig-nals the availability of high quality food. The final measure included as a measure of food security is the dietary availability of vita-min A. This last indicator is based on a qual-itative assessment on a 0-2 scale with higher values representing higher availability of vita-min A. Combined these three indicators offer an insight in the availability of high quality food. It could be argued that using these in-dicators of the quality of food provide a mea-sure of the utilization of food rather than the availability of food. This is not the case since the utilization dimension looks at the require-ments for the body to transform food into
en-ergy rather than looking at the quality of the food itself. In addition, omitting these indi-cators from the availability dimension would mean that the quality aspect would be ignored, as observed by Headey and Ecker (2013). In-cluding measures on micronutrients thus is a way to measure the availability of food more extensively than by looking at ’cheap’ calories alone (Pangaribowo et al., 2013).
Table 3: Availability Indicators
1 Average food supply Kcal per capita
per day
2 Dependency on chronic
food aid Qualitative (0-2)
3 Existence of adequate
crop storage facilities Qualitative (0-1)
4 Cereal Yield Kilograms per ha
5 Food loss between har-vesting and distribution
Total waste/total domestic supply 6 Dietary availability of animal iron mg per person per day
7 Protein quality Grams of quality
proteins consumed 8 Dietary availability
of vitamin A Qualitative (0-2)
Access The second dimension of food secu-rity, access, represents the affordability and the allocation of food. To measure access, three indicators will be used which are presented in Table 4. The food consumption as a share of household expenditure measures the rel-ative importance of food in household budgets (EIU, 2015). If households spend a larger per-centage of income on food they are more vul-nerable to for instance adverse price shocks. As such, high household expenditure on food signals problems with the access to food and therefore is included in the index. Further-more, using this indicator is in line with articles discussing the measurement of food security (Pangaribowo et al., 2013). The second indi-cator is the proportion of population living under the $ poverty line. As mentioned ear-lier, people living in poverty generally have the biggest problem with obtaining food. Furhter-more, they are very vulnerable to changes in
food prices (Zezza & Tasciotti, 2010). As such, the percentage of population living in poverty is a useful indicator to measure the access to food in a country. The third and last indi-cator of access is used to measure the alloca-tion of food in a country: the presence of a formal grocery sector . This indicator is quantitatively measured on a three point scale and obtained from the GFSI. Values of 0 refer to minimal presence of a formal grocery sector whereas values of 2 refer to a widespread formal grocery sector. Having a formal grocery sector will help with the allocation of food within a country because it provides a consistent source of food which is generally subject to public or private oversight (EIU, 2015).
Table 4: Access Indicators
1 Food consumption as a share of household expenditure
% of household expenditure 2 Proportion of population
under the $2 poverty line % of population 3 Presence of a formal
grocery sector Qualitative (0-2)
Utilization The final dimension of food se-curity, utilization, refers to the adequate uti-lization of food by looking at the ability of the body to metabolize the food (Gross et al., 2000). To measure this dimension, five indi-cators will be used. These indiindi-cators are pre-sented in Table 5.
The first two indicators are anthropomet-ric indicators and measure the nutritional out-comes at the individual level. The percent-age of children with underweight mea-sures the percentage of children under the age of 5 with weight-for-age below 2-standard devi-ations from the reference median (EIU, 2015). Higher values refer to a larger percentage of children with underweight and therefore signals problems with the utilization of food. The in-dicator measures the underweight of children rather than underweight of the entire popula-tion because of the importance of nutripopula-tion at low age as nutritional deficiencies affect physi-cal and mental development during the rest of a persons life. Furthermore, as mentioned
be-fore, lacking development of children can sig-nal problems with the nutrition of other fam-ily members, especially that of breastfeeding mothers and pregnant women (Alderman et al., 2006; Bhutta et al., 2008). The next indicator is similar to the first one in that it measures physical problems with children. The per-centage of children stunted measures the proportion of children that is stunted (which means that they have a below average height for their age).
It could be argued that these indicators also measure the availability and access dimensions. However, as mentioned in Section 2, the dimen-sions of food security are not isolated from each other entirely. A requirement for the utiliza-tion of food is that there is food available and accessible. But, with measuring the availabil-ity or access dimensions, nutritional outcomes are not directly measured. Using anthropo-metric indicators does allow for direct measure-ment of the nutritional outcomes at the indi-vidual level and thereby is a good indicator of the ability of the body to metabolize food.
The next two indicators of the utilization di-mension are related to the conditions required to adequately utilize food. The public health expenditure per capita is included to mea-sure the quality of the health care system in a country and is obtained from the World Bank Database. In addition to a well-functioning healthcare system, access to drinking water is also important for utilization of food. To mea-sure this the percentage of population with access to potable water is included. These indicators signal whether a country has the fa-cilities required to provide safe food, a require-ment for the utilization of food (EIU, 2015).
The final indicator of the utilization dimen-sion is the diet diversity in a country mea-sured by the share of non-starchy foods in the total dietary energy consumption. Diet diver-sification is identified as an important indicator for the utilization of food in a country (Headey & Ecker, 2013; Pangaribowo et al., 2013). It is argued that diets that consist of higher per-centages of non-starchy foods are more nutri-tious (EIU, 2015). Poor diet diversification is often associated with a deficiency of
micro-nutrients and limited growth amongst children (Ruel, 2003; Savy, Martin-Pr´evel, Sawadogo, Kameli, & Delpeuch, 2005; Ruel, Deitchler, & Arimond, 2010). Higher levels of diet diversifi-cation are thus a signal of better utilization of food in a country.
Table 5: Utilization Indicators
1 Children with
underweight % of children under 5 2 Children stunted % of children under 5 3 Public health expenditure
per capita Current US $ 4 Access to potable water % of population 5 Diet diversification % of non-starchy foods
in total diet
4.3
Estimation Strategy
To test the hypotheses presented in Section 3, this thesis uses linear regression models in the statistical software package R. As discussed be-fore, these models include controls for drivers of food security that are exogenous to the anal-ysis. Some argue that economic development is the most important driver of food security (Breisinger et al., 2010). To control for the impact of economic development, the GDP per capita expressed in thousands US dollars, is added to the model as a control variable. Countries with higher GDP per capita tend to be more food secure because of higher wealth and a better ability of people to obtain food (EIU, 2015).
A second control variable is the population growth , measured as the average growth per-centage over the last five years. Using the aver-age of five years rather than the last value has the benefit of providing a more robust measure by reducing the effect of years with unexpected high or low population growth. High popu-lation growth threatens food security because of the rapidly increasing demand and lagging growth in supply (Godfray et al., 2010; Barron et al., n.d.).
The third and final control variable deals with the natural capital in a country. This is measured using the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) benefits index . This
in-dex is a comprehensive indicator of the bio-diversity potential in a country. The potential biodiversity measures the quality of the ecosys-tem which is argued to be a driver of the avail-ability of food (Barron et al., n.d.). As such, this control variable will only be used when es-timating the impact of gender equality and ed-ucation on the availability dimension.
In addition to the mentioned control vari-ables, regional fixed effects will be included to the model. Regional fixed effects are used to control for unobserved regional effects that would otherwise be omitted from the model. These unobserved effects are shared within re-gions but are different across rere-gions such as a shared culture or language. Due to the limited amount of countries included in the dataset, only five different regions are used: Asia and Pacific, Latin America and Caribbean, Middle-East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The
regional fixed effects are included as dummy variables in the regression. One dummy, that of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, will be omitted in order to avoid multicollinearity.
To conclude this section, the baseline model is presented in equation 1. The dependent vari-able, Yi, represents an individual dimension of
food security (such as the availability dimen-sion) in country i. Which dimension is used depends on the hypothesis that is tested. Xi
is a vector containing the political-institutional variables, and Ziis a vector containing the
con-trol variables. Regional fixed effects are repre-sented by ηi and i is the error term.
5
Results
This section is dedicated to presenting the re-sults of the quantitative analysis. First the gender equality hypotheses will be tested fol-lowed by the education hypotheses. After test-ing these hypotheses, several other findtest-ings will be presented.
5.1
Gender Equality
Based on the existing literature on gender equality and food security, it is expected that developing countries with greater gender equal-ity are more food secure. For the availabilequal-ity dimension, the equal access to means of pro-duction between men and women is expected to be important. The access to food is expected to be greater in countries with more gender equal-ity due to increased household income as well as an improved household bargaining position of women. And finally, the utilization of food is argued to be greater in countries where women have a stronger position due to the allocation of the household budget in favour of nutrition and health. The first four hypotheses are used to test whether these theoretical expectations are supported by the data.
Before testing the hypotheses, it has to be noted that for the models that deal with gender equality, population growth is excluded from the set of control variables. The reason for this is the strong correlation between population growth and gender equality. Countries with more gender inequality generally have higher fertility rates, as is shown in Figure 4A. These higher fertility rates directly impact the popu-lation growth (Figure 4B). Because of this re-lationship, including population growth as a control variable would cause the estimates to be biased.
Hypothesis 1 The first hypothesis is used to determine the impact of equal access for men and women to means of production on the availability of food. As mentioned in Section 3, it is suggested that if female farmers would have access to means of production equal to that of men, they could increase their yields
Figure 4: Population growth and gender
equality
Note: The Gender Inequality Index is a composite indicator used to measure the level of gender
inequality in a country and is obtained from the GFSI.
by as much as 20 to 30 percent (FAO, 2010, p.40).
To measure the equal access to means of pro-duction, four indicators are used. All of these indicators are obtained from the Social Insti-tutions and Gender Index (2016). The first indicator measures the access to financial
services for women . This indicator
mea-sures whether men and women have equal ac-cess to financial services according to the law. Scores of 0 refer to women not having the same rights as men to access finance whereas scores of 1 mean that men and women have the same rights. Scores of 0.5 are used to identify cases where the law offers equality but where
Table 6: Gender Equality and Availability
Availability
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Female Access to Financial Services 9.125 (7.357)
Female Access to Land −3.276 (8.929)
Female Access to Non-land Assets 2.637 (8.459)
Inheritance Rights of Daughters 3.666 (7.466) GDP per capita 1.105∗∗∗(0.187) 1.134∗∗∗(0.188) 1.126∗∗∗(0.188) 1.121∗∗∗(0.188)
Biodiversity 0.281∗∗∗(0.101) 0.276∗∗∗(0.104) 0.263∗∗(0.102) 0.268∗∗(0.102)
Constant 45.798∗∗∗(8.383) 56.707∗∗∗(9.473) 51.576∗∗∗(9.032) 50.434∗∗∗(8.768)
Regional Fixed Effects Yes Yes Yes Yes
Observations 80 80 80 80 R2 0.686 0.679 0.679 0.680 Adjusted R2 0.655 0.648 0.648 0.649 Residual Std. Error 15.074 15.220 15.224 15.209 F Statistic 22.425∗∗∗ 21.801∗∗∗ 21.784∗∗∗ 21.848∗∗∗ Note: ∗p<0.1;∗∗p<0.05;∗∗∗p<0.01
women are limited in their access based on cus-tomary, traditional, or religious grounds. The women’s access to land use, control, and ownership and women’s access to non-land assets are measured similarly to the first indicator. As discussed in Section 3, women are sometimes limited in their access to land due inheritance rights. To measure this a variable indicating inheritance laws for daughters is included. Higher values correspond to more equal inheritance laws.
Table 6 reports the results of the baseline model. None of the reported estimates for the equal access to means of production is signif-icant. This implies that, based on the data used, no support is found for the theoretical ex-pectation that in countries with more equal ac-cess to means of production more food is avail-able. As such, no evidence is found to support the first hypothesis.
However, when excluding regional fixed ef-fects from the model, the estimates are found to be significantly positive (the results of this model are presented in Table 17 in Appendix C). This implies that, when ignoring regional effects, the data supports the hypothesis. The difference between the results of the baseline model and this model thus point towards re-gional factors playing an important role in de-termining the availability of food.
Further investigation of the model without
Figure 5: Gender equality and availability in democracies (grey) and autocracies (black)
The points show the estimates, the lines represent the 95 percent confidence interval. The results are based on the model without region fixed effects. The coefficients of the control variables are excluded from the figure but have been included in the regression.
regional fixed effects suggests that a difference exists between democracies and autocracies. Using the Polity IV dataset (Polity IV, 2015), the sample can be split up between democra-cies and autocrademocra-cies. Values of smaller than five on the Polity variable are considered to be autocracies, while countries with values of 5 or higher are considered to be democracies. Fig-ure 5 shows the results of the regression out-puts in a graphical form. The grey dots
