Measuring Chronic Hunger from Diet Snapshots

To measure hunger and poverty requires studying the lower tail of distributions, which calls for accurate surveying of both means and variances. Surveys often gather data on respondents for only a short period—taking what is here called a “snapshot”—and although these surveys may be adequate for measuring means and totals, they overstate annual variances and the chronic hunger rate. A new method of deriving chronic hunger estimates from snapshot surveys is proposed, which also allows the transient component of hunger to be identified. This method is demonstrated using a household survey from Myanmar that has repeated observations on households during the year. The transient component of hunger is almost one-half of total hunger. Thus if the transient component is not identified, uncorrected snapshot surveys may measure current hunger but overstate the chronic hunger rate by almost 90%. Results for food consumption in Nigeria are also reported to show that the method matters more broadly; these results highlight the potential for measurement error to distort inferences about the importance of transient welfare fluctuations.