Data and descriptive statistics

Our intent is to estimate the effect of food aid on child nutrition. As the dependent variable, we use the stunting indicator (height for age) of the World Bank that estimates the percentage of children under the age of five whose height for age is

94 The authors use the number of people killed by famines and droughts in a country during a given year as dependent variable.

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more than two standard deviations below the median for the international reference population of the same age. To put it in a nutshell, it is the percentage of stunted children in a country. The data are based on the World Health Organisation's (WHO) new child growth standards released in 2006. In order to make the regression outcomes easier to interpret, we do not use the percentage of stunted children, but rearrange the variable, such that the dependent variable states the percentage of children that are not stunted and therefore presumably in good health (thus, a positive coefficient in the regression output indicates a positive effect of food aid on health). Just like the data on total official development assistance (ODA) in chapter 4, food aid data is provided by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD. Again, we use disbursement data instead of data on commitments, meaning that the stated amount is actually disbursed to the recipient country in the given year. We only include countries in the regression that have received food aid at least once within the period under study (1995 onwards).

Several external factors that might have an effect on the nutritional and health status of children and therefore on their height and weight are also controlled for. For instance, we include infant mortality, government health expenditure, the percentage of women receiving prenatal care, immunisation rates as well as the HIV rates to account for the health environment in a country.⁹⁵ The share of arable land and the share of the population living in rural areas could provide information on the availability of food.

Countries with a high share of arable land, for instance, are more likely to be able to provide a sufficient amount of domestic food supply. Moreover, highly rural societies might have different access to food despite poverty as they are more likely to grow their own food. Countries with poor records in political rights might distribute resources differently than fully democratic countries. More specifically, democracies are more likely to channel food aid to people in need, whereas autocracies might prefer to distribute resources to the elite or important political supporters (Plümper and Neumayer 2007). Therefore, we also include the political rights score by Freedom

95 The number of doctors per 1,000 people was too closely correlated with the infant mortality rate and was therefore omitted.

Chapter 5. Does food aid improve child nutrition? An anthropometric assessment of children’s nutritional status in recipient economies.

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House.⁹⁶ Sources and definitions of other explanatory variables can be found in the appendix.

Table 5.1 shows the descriptive statistics of the variables used in the regression analysis.

On average, the amount of food aid accounts for less than 1% of GDP, which is in line with the findings of chapter 5.2: food aid flows have become relatively small since the 1990s.⁹⁷ 33.8% of the children below the age of five are stunted (66.2% not stunted) in the average country in our regressions.

Notes: Numbers are calculated for the fixed effects regressions of Table 5.3 where included variables are non-missing. Food aid/GDP minimum values are not exactly zero, but very small values below 0.005.

Immunisation (dpt) is the rate of children that were adequately immunised against diphtheria, pertussis and tuberculosis. Where variables are defined as percentages, values are divided by 100: a value of 0.5 is therefore equal to 50%.

A closer look at the data reveals which countries suffer from particularly severe stunting and malnutrition and whether these countries are also the main recipients of food aid.

Table 5.2 shows the ten countries with the highest average percentage of stunted or

96 We do not use the Polity IV data in this paper, because the Freedom House data provides a more abundant data set for the period under study.

97 The high maximum value for “other aid” is due to the high amounts of official development assistance given to Liberia after the Second Liberian civil war (1999-2003).

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malnourished children in the period under study (1995 onwards), as well as the countries that received the highest average amount of total food aid and food aid relative to GDP. Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Malawi, India and Eritrea are amongst the top ten recipients of food aid and also amongst the countries with the highest percentage of stunted and malnourished children. Therefore, the critique that donors do not provide aid to the neediest countries does not seem justified at a first glance, at least for the post-1995 period

Table 5.2: Countries with highest average values of malnutrition, stunting and food aid

Notes: The values are the average numbers for the entire period under study. Sources: Food aid: OECD;

% stunted and % underweight: World Bank.