Skip to main content

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?


Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index, which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available?


The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions.

If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income.

GHI Chapter two figure one

An illustration of the score system is just below.

GHI Severity Scale

And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000 to 2015.



GHI Chapter two figure three


Let's note down those countries that have seen very little improvement; Namibia, Sri Lanka, Central African Republic, Iraq, Chad and Pakistan.

Now let's note those with the highest scores overall; Central African Republic, Chad, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Haiti.

The Central African Republic and Chad are on both shortlists. Maybe we should look at these two and see what kind of scores their governments get in the Economic Freedom of the World index. The EFW rankings are from 0.1 to 10 with 10 being complete economic freedom.

Central African Republic - 5.3
Chad - 5.1

What kind of contrast would that make with the EFW scores for those countries that have managed high improvement rates in their GHI scores?

Cambodia - 7.3
Myanmar - 5.6
Rwanda - 7.4

Myanmar sticks out, though its EFW score is still higher than either of the laggardly countries dealt with here. The lesson? Leave people alone to their own devices and world hunger goes away in a generation. Interfere and you look like the Central African Republic and Chad.

If that sounds simplified it's cos it is, but look through the data as much as you please and you'll still find that the thrust of what I'm saying is true.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...
Post a Comment
Read more

RIP Macroeconomics

This post has no intellectual rigour, but I'm posting it anyway, because neither does macroeconomics. Most economists love spending all day doing macro, preferring it to the prosaic small-scale world of microeconomics. This is where the brazen hypocrisy of many heterodox folks will make itself known, as they decry the fallacies of composition rife within neoclassical economics and then go away and commit the same daft mistakes themselves (sometimes quite well disguised) using aggregates of demand, supply, and labour time. Further friction for modern economists can be had when contending with the tripartite division of economics into land, labour, capital, and the action of classes (the 'class' praxis) of the owners of those three economic resources. So, to all of macroecon... you're drunk. Go home and rethink your life.* * Yes I know I just committed a fallacy of reification.
Post a Comment
Read more

Foreign Policy hates you...

In Foreign Policy a hardcore fluff piece * talks about young Americans falling out of love with capitalism. The closing paragraph is very artful but also insipid and inaccurate. Read it and weep! ~~~ * A fluff piece that does a very bad job of grappling with a subject that is actually important.
Post a Comment
Read more