Indexing household resilience to food insecurity shocks: The case of South Sudan

ABSTRACT

Based on a number of household characteristics, livelihood capitals and endowments, we generate a household food security resilience index. The rationale of the paper is premised on the notion that resilience to food insecurity is a property of wealth and thus its proxy. The study explored the statistical robustness and efficiency of the technique in providing evidence for triggering alerts and action for curbing risk of food insecurity uncertainties. It is established that Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is helpful in constructing a summary measure (referred to here as Household Resilience Index or HRI in short) that is an efficient proxy for wealth index, which is based on consumption data, and that predicts per capita consumption very well. The paper elaborates six distinctive characteristics of the HRI that support its adoption and use. The dataset used in the study is from the 2009 South Sudan National Household Baseline Survey.

Keywords:

• Livelihood capitals
• food insecurity
• household resilience
• asset index
• principal components

JEL Classification Codes:

• C430
• C650
• O150