Speaker
Description
Two challenges faced by many societies around the world are high levels of income inequality and nutritional outcomes, such as the prevalence of overweight, undernutrition, and micronutrient deficiency. Existing research suggests that policy trade-offs exist between the reduction of economic inequality and of adverse nutritional outcomes. However, while the formulation of targeted policies would require a solid understanding of the actual mechanisms that link income inequality to nutritional outcomes, the specific transmission channels underlying this relationship are not clear yet.
One such potential transmission channel is the quality of food intake, and particularly of dietary diversity. While much evidence suggests that balanced, diverse diets are key to healthy nutritional outcomes, no studies to date look at the role of dietary diversity as a potential transmission channel between inequality and nutritional outcomes.
This paper offers a first step to filling this gap by generating insights on the relationship between income inequality and dietary diversity. The empirical analysis relies on a panel dataset of 122 countries with seven observations each from a range of 28 years. Dietary diversity is measured by the weighted Household Dietary Diversity Index, calculated as the number of different food groups regularly consumed by households, weighted by the nutritional quality of the respective food group. To overcome the implicit assumption of constancy in unobserved country characteristics in the conventional fixed effects estimator, we employ the group fixed effects estimator, which allows for the estimation of time-varying unobservables.
The results of the analysis are statistically significant and suggest that in contexts of medium or high levels of inequality (top four quintiles in the inequality range), a decrease in inequality is associated with increases in dietary diversity. The result is intuitive because measures of redistribution lead, ceteris paribus, to increasing incomes for low-income households for whom limited funds may have restricted dietary diversity. In countries with initially low levels of income inequality (lowest quintile of the inequality range), a further decrease in inequality is associated with a decrease in dietary diversity. In those contexts, it is not the low-income households’ funds that restrict dietary diversity, so increasing their incomes would not increase dietary diversity.
| Status of your work | First results |
|---|---|
| Early Career Researcher Award | No, the paper is not eligible |
