ESSAYS ON DIETARY DIVERSITY IN PAKISTAN

PhD Synopsis
Presented by: Irfan Ullah
Supervised by: Dr. Anwar Shah
School of Economics
Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
Introduction
• Background
• Dietary quantity vs dietary quality
• Issue of malnutrition
• Dietary diversity- a proxy for dietary quality
• Indicators for dietary diversity
• Importance of dietary diversity for food security

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Literature Review
• Kant, (1996)
• Drewnowski, et. al., (1997)
• Hoddinott & Yohannes, (2002)
• Arimond, & Ruel, (2004)
• Steyn, et al., (2005)
• Parappurathu, et. al., (2015)
• Frempong, & Annim, (2017)

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Research Gap
• More focus on food demand and calories-income/price elasticities
rather than dietary quality and balanced diets
• Need to think beyond calories demand
• Threshold /cutpoint of DDS and FVS by using sensitivity and
specificity analysis
• The linkages between DD and double burden of malnutrition

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Objectives of the study
• To estimate socio-economic determinants of dietary diversity in
Pakistan
• To decompose dietary diversity differences across rural-urban region
• To analyze the nexus between dietary diversity and nutritional status
for non-poor and poor households

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Significance of the Study

• The study will be helpful to analyse regional, seasonal and income

groups differences of dietary diversity and its socio-economic
determinants in Pakistan.
• Further, decomposition of mean differences of dietary diversity will be
helpful to identifying those factors which are source of this difference
and how much it is explained by socio-economic characteristics of the
households.
• The analysis of the nexus between dietary diversity and nutritional
status for poor and non-poor will be helpful to identify the issue of
double burden of malnutrition.
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First Essay: Socio-economic determinants of dietary diversity in Pakistan

• Importance/background
• Literature review
• Lee, (1987).
• Lee & Brown, (1989)
• Rashid, Smith, & Rahman, (2011)
• Liu, Shively, & Binkley, (2014)
• Objectives
• Dietary diversity:
• Dietary Diversity Score (DDS)
• Food Varity Score (FVS)
• Data source and variables description
• HIES Survey 2018-19 of Pakistan (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics)
• http://www.pbs.gov.pk/content/microdata.
• Socio-economic, demographic, regional and seasonal variables
• Methodology
• Models for count outcomes
• Poisson Regression Models (PRM)
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• Negative Binomial Regression Models (NBRM)
Model Specification for Dietary Diversity
• The probability of observing a count of (DD) , conditional on a set
of explanatory variables, , is assumed to be given by
(1)
And mean parameter:
(2)
The conditional mean is given by:
(3)

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Continued…
• The following Poisson regression model is used to estimate coefficients for
overall, rural and urban regions separately:

(4)

• Problem of overdispersion
• Tests for overdispersion
• Deviance statistic
• Pearson statistic
• Negative Binomial Regression Models
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Second Essay: Explaining Heterogeneity of Dietary
Diversity across Rural-Urban areas of Pakistan
• Introduction
• Literature review
• Oaxaca, (1973)
• Blinder, (1973)
• Powers, Yoshioka, & Yun, (2011)
• Hirvonen, K. (2016)
• Worku et.al., (2017)
• Headey, Hoddinott, & Park, (2016)
• Objectives
• Methods for mean decomposition
• Multivariate Oaxaca-Blinder Poisson decomposition method 10
Model Specification for Mean Decomposition
• The mean decomposition for dietary diversity across regions will be expressed as:

(5)

• The following Poisson regression model will be used to estimate coefficients for rural and urban
regions separately:

(6)
• The detailed decomposition for dietary diversity by using weights can be expressed as:

Where the weights for covariate i are:

And

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Third Essay: Analysis of the nexus between dietary
diversity and nutritional/food insecurity status for
poor and non-poor households in Pakistan
• Introduction
• Issue of double burden of malnutrition
• Undernutrition- food insecure
• Overnutrition- highly food secure
• Literature review
• Mishra, & Ray, (2009).
• Mahadevan, & Hoang, (2015)
• Maitra, & Rao, (2015)
• Popkin, et al., (2020)
• Methodology
• Exploratory analysis
• Sensitivity-Specificity analysis for cut-point of DDS/FVS and its link with nutritional
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status
Thank you

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