Is Food Insecurity an Economic or Subjective Measure of Hardship?

• In Event: Poverty

Abstract

Food insecurity is a widely used measure of hardship, but its relationship with other measures of hardship is not well understood. Although food insecure households tend to have low levels of material resources in cross-sectional analyses, recent causal studies find no relationship between these resources and food insecurity. Some research has addressed these counterintuitive results by contending that food insecurity reflects subjective perceptions of hardship rather than objective economic deprivation, but evidence on the relationship between subjective wellbeing and food insecurity is relatively limited. This study leverages longitudinal data from three nationally representative surveys to evaluate whether food insecurity is more strongly related to economic or subjective measures of hardship by examining whether within-household changes in food insecurity are more closely associated with changes in objectively measured material resources or changes in subjective measures of wellbeing. I find that within-household changes in food insecurity are only weakly associated with changes in income and wealth but are much more strongly correlated with changes in households’ direct experiences of hardship. I also document a weak association between within-household changes in food insecurity and several measures of subjective wellbeing. In sum, food security status is highly persistent within households over time, even conditional on large changes in objective material resources or subjective wellbeing.

Author

• Thomas O'Rourke, Princeton University