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Book (stand-alone)The impact of trade openness on the cost and affordability of a healthy diet
Background paper for The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) 2024
2025Also available in:
No results found.This study examines how trade openness affects the cost and affordability of healthy diets using cross-country data on food prices linked to nutritional composition. Using retail price data collected from 175 countries in the context of the 2017 cycle of the World Bank’s International Comparison Program, the research investigates whether trade openness correlates with lower food prices and if this effect varies for healthier products. The analysis confirms that lower trade barriers are associated with reduced food prices, consistent with standard international trade theory. This finding holds across different measures of trade openness and levels of analysis. Importantly, results show no evidence that international trade disproportionately affects processed food prices or makes healthy options relatively more expensive. -
Book (series)Methods and options to monitor the cost and affordability of a healthy diet globally
Background paper for The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022
2022Also available in:
No results found.FAO is focusing its attention on the pursuit of healthy diets and transformations of agrifood systems to ensure healthy diets are affordable for all. Measuring and systematically monitoring the cost and affordability of healthy diets and making progress towards ensuring the affordability of healthy diets is of upmost importance and is urgently needed. To this end, FAO is committed to institutionalize the computation of the least-cost healthy diet, and the corresponding affordability indicator, and to publish updated estimates in the annual The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, as well as provide the full data series on FAOSTAT. This background paper to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 report presents the new methodological refinements applied in the estimation of the average cost of a healthy diet. This is an important methodological update as it results in a more robust indicator that provides greater transparency and supports long-term systematic monitoring utilizing annually updated price data. The paper then explores potential mechanisms and data sources for monitoring globally the cost of a healthy diet. -
Book (series)Methods for monitoring the cost of a healthy diet based on price data from the International Comparison Program 2024
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No results found.The cost of a healthy diet (CoHD) and the affordability indicators – namely the prevalence (PUA) and the number (NUA) of people unable to afford a healthy diet – measure economic access to adequate food aligned with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ (FAO) definition of food security. This paper describes and validates methods to compute the cost of a healthy diet in the gap years between the International Comparison Program (ICP) publication cycles using food inflation, or general inflation if food inflation data are not available. It also shows that adjusting energy requirements based on different demographics leads to minor changes in cost (less than 3 percent) and requires extra computational and data inputs while complicating the meaning of the indicator, and therefore is not recommended. Inflation data provide unbiased estimates at the global, regional and income group level for the short term, but this method may not capture accurate diet cost changes at the individual country or territory level. Higher frequency retail price data at the food item level are needed for more accurate and timely monitoring at the country or territory level.
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