You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures

Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world, and will continue to do so as GDP per person grows and food systems evolve. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys have not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications...

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Main Authors:	Farfán, Gabriela, Genoni, María Eugenia, Vakis, Renos
Format:	Journal Article
Published:	Elsevier 2018
Subjects:	POVERTY INEQUALITY NUTRITION WELFARE MEASURES FOOD CONSUMPTION
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29169

id	okr-10986-29169
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	okr-10986-291692021-05-26T09:05:20Z You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures Farfán, Gabriela Genoni, María Eugenia Vakis, Renos POVERTY INEQUALITY NUTRITION WELFARE MEASURES FOOD CONSUMPTION Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world, and will continue to do so as GDP per person grows and food systems evolve. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys have not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from clear, and the direction of the impact cannot be established a priori. This paper exploits rich data on food away from home collected as part of the National Household Survey in Peru, to shed light on the extent to which welfare measures differ depending on whether food away from home is accounted for or not. Peru is a relevant context, with the average Peruvian household spending over a quarter of their food budget on food away from home since 2010. The analysis indicates that failure to account for this consumption has important implications for poverty and inequality measures as well as the understanding of who the poor are. First, accounting for food away from home results in extreme poverty rates that are 18 percent higher and moderate poverty rates that are 16 percent lower. These results are also consistent, in fact more pronounced, with poverty gap and severity measures. Second, consumption inequality measured by the Gini coefficient decreases by 1.3 points when food away from home is included – a significant reduction. Finally, the inclusion of food away from home results in a reclassification of households across poor/non-poor status – 20 percent of the poor are different, resulting in small but significant differences in the profile of the poor in dimensions such as demographics, education, and labor market characteristics. Taken together, the results indicate that a serious rethinking of how to deal with the consumption of food away from home in measuring well-being is urgently needed to properly estimate and understand poverty around the world. 2018-01-18T16:08:07Z 2018-01-18T16:08:07Z 2017-10 Journal Article Food Policy 0306-9192 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29169 CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo World Bank Elsevier Publications & Research :: Journal Article Publications & Research
repository_type	Digital Repository
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	Digital Repositories
building	World Bank Open Knowledge Repository
collection	World Bank
topic	POVERTY INEQUALITY NUTRITION WELFARE MEASURES FOOD CONSUMPTION
spellingShingle	POVERTY INEQUALITY NUTRITION WELFARE MEASURES FOOD CONSUMPTION Farfán, Gabriela Genoni, María Eugenia Vakis, Renos You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures
description	Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world, and will continue to do so as GDP per person grows and food systems evolve. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys have not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from clear, and the direction of the impact cannot be established a priori. This paper exploits rich data on food away from home collected as part of the National Household Survey in Peru, to shed light on the extent to which welfare measures differ depending on whether food away from home is accounted for or not. Peru is a relevant context, with the average Peruvian household spending over a quarter of their food budget on food away from home since 2010. The analysis indicates that failure to account for this consumption has important implications for poverty and inequality measures as well as the understanding of who the poor are. First, accounting for food away from home results in extreme poverty rates that are 18 percent higher and moderate poverty rates that are 16 percent lower. These results are also consistent, in fact more pronounced, with poverty gap and severity measures. Second, consumption inequality measured by the Gini coefficient decreases by 1.3 points when food away from home is included – a significant reduction. Finally, the inclusion of food away from home results in a reclassification of households across poor/non-poor status – 20 percent of the poor are different, resulting in small but significant differences in the profile of the poor in dimensions such as demographics, education, and labor market characteristics. Taken together, the results indicate that a serious rethinking of how to deal with the consumption of food away from home in measuring well-being is urgently needed to properly estimate and understand poverty around the world.
format	Journal Article
author	Farfán, Gabriela Genoni, María Eugenia Vakis, Renos
author_facet	Farfán, Gabriela Genoni, María Eugenia Vakis, Renos
author_sort	Farfán, Gabriela
title	You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures
title_short	You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures
title_full	You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures
title_fullStr	You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures
title_full_unstemmed	You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures
title_sort	you are what (and where) you eat : capturing food away from home in welfare measures
publisher	Elsevier
publishDate	2018
url	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29169
_version_	1764468677527207936

You Are What (and Where) You Eat : Capturing Food Away from Home in Welfare Measures

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