Development Finance, Governance Quality and their Impact on Food and Nutrition Security in Sub-Saharan Africa

The levels of food insecurity and malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have seen an unprecedented rise in recent years and have also resulted in increased foreign capital flows in the region in the form of support for development projects, foreign direct investment and humanitarian relief. At the same time, there exists a complex interaction between institutions, capital flows, and food and nutrition security. In this paper we estimate a series of panel data models to examine the impact of governance quality and capital flows (in the form of ODA, FDI, Portfolio Equity and Remittances) on food and nutrition security in a group of 25 SSA countries over the period 1996 to 2018. One of the key contributions of the paper is the use of both aggregate and disaggregated capital flows to examine the impact on both food and nutrition security, a dimension that has been surprisingly neglected in the relevant literature. We combine this with the interaction of various types of capital flows with a governance quality index we constructed from various governance indicators and in order to examine also the impact of institutions on the overall nexus. Our findings clearly demonstrate inter alia the centrality of a disaggregation approach in both the development finance and the food security/nutrition security literature and reflect on earlier work regarding the role of institutions in the overall nexus between external capital flows and growth which leads, and as expected, to an interesting variation in the results obtained.