Food Security and Economic Growth: Tracing Food Demand and Supply Factors to Mitigate Prevalence of Undernourishment in Asian Countries

Abstract

The issue of food security has constantly been at the front line of intensive debate among researchers worldwide. Food security is a multilayered notion embracing time and space dimensions. The complexity of the concept of food security makes it difficult to thrash out its drivers. Prevalence of Undernourishment (POU) finds its manifestation in the food security phenomenon. As a linchpin of food security, the present study has focused on POU by using three-fold analyses to find out its trends, frequencies, and determinants. The study has identified the factors responsible for the prevalence of undernourishment in 31 Asian countries, subdivided into five regions i.e. Central Asia, Eastern Asia, Southern Asia, Southeast Asia, and Western Asia over the period of 1990-2017. The study has applied pool regression to estimate POU based on food demand and supply factors. In trend analysis, it is explored that the majority of the countries have followed a quadratic trend. The frequency analysis has revealed the distinct patterns of relationship between GDPPC growth rates and POU exhibiting that the maximum number of observations falls in the negative range of economic growth rate for all the groups of countries with varying ranges of POU. In econometric analysis, using dummies for the different regions of Asia, it is found that food demand and supply factors are highly significant and negatively associated with POU. Moreover, the study enlists some policy implications from the prism of both the food demand and supply sides factors to lessen POU.