Trade policy reform, retail food prices and access to healthy diets worldwide.

Recent use of least-cost diets as a measure of global food security revealed that over 3 billion people are unable to afford sufficient nutritious food for an active and healthy life, driving demand for policy changes to improve access and affordability. This study quantifies the role of imports in consumer prices, matching retail prices in 144 countries to imports by origin of the item or its main ingredient, resulting in a total of 13,846 pairs of a retail price and its import cost in 2017. We find that 55% of retail items had some active imports supplementing domestic production, and of those around 48% have nonzero tariffs whose average effective rate is around 6.

Cost and affordability of nutritious diets at retail prices: Evidence from 177 countries.

Many policies and programs aim to bring nutritious diets within reach of the poor. This paper uses retail prices and nutrient composition for 671 foods and beverages to compute the daily cost of essential nutrients required for an active and healthy life in 177 countries around the world. We compare this minimum cost of nutrient adequacy with the subsistence cost of dietary energy and per-capita spending on all goods and services, to identify stylized facts about how diet cost and affordability relate to economic development and nutrition outcomes.

Climatic conditions and child height: Sex-specific vulnerability and the protective effects of sanitation and food markets in Nepal.

Environmental conditions in early life are known to have impacts on later health outcomes, but causal mechanisms and potential remedies have been difficult to discern. This paper uses the Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys of 2006 and 2011, combined with earlier NASA satellite observations of variation in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) at each child's location and time of birth to identify the trimesters of gestation and periods of infancy when climate variation is linked to attained height later in life. We find significant differences by sex: males are most affected by conditions in their second trimester of gestation, and females in the first three months after birth.

Macro shocks and micro outcomes: child nutrition during Indonesia's crisis.

A survey of households in rural Java is used to assess the nutritional impact of Indonesia's drought and financial crisis of 1997/1998. A time-age-cohort decomposition reveals significant nutritional impacts. However, child weight-for-age (WAZ) remained constant throughout the crisis, despite rapid increases in food prices and the consequent household consumption shock.