Food prices and the wages of the poor: A cost-effective addition to high-frequency food security monitoring.

ABSTRACT: The affordability of nutritious food for "all people, at all times" is a critically important dimension of food security. Yet surprisingly, timely high-frequency indicators of food affordability are rarely collected in any systematic fashion despite price volatility emerging as major source of food insecurity in the 21st Century. The 2008 global food crisis prompted international agencies to invest heavily in monitoring domestic food prices in low and middle income countries (LMICs). However, food price monitoring is not sufficient for measuring changes in diet affordability; for that, one must also measure changes either in income or in an income proxy. We propose using the wages of unskilled workers as a cheap and sufficiently accurate income proxy, especially for the urban and rural non

SUBMITTER: Headey D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11190886 | biostudies-literature | 2024 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature