Publication: The Cost of a Nutritious Diet in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal
Loading...
Files in English
1,170 downloads
Date
2021-03
ISSN
Published
2021-03
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This paper calculates and compares the minimum cost of a recommended diet across four countries in South Asia. The analysis finds that the cost of a recommended diet is highest in the smaller countries, such as Bhutan and Nepal, but because of differences in purchasing power, more households are unable to afford the cost of a recommended diet in India. Within countries, the cost and affordability vary across urban and rural areas, subnational areas, and seasons of the year. The cost of perishable food items, such as vegetables and fruits, drives the differences across subnational areas and seasons. In a context of constrained resources, this suggests the need for strategic prioritization of investments and service improvements in transport and storage of food and, more broadly, a rethink of food policies.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Dizon, Felipe; Wang, Zetianyu; Mulmi, Prajula. 2021. The Cost of a Nutritious Diet in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9578. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35285 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Future of Poverty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-15)Climate change is increasingly acknowledged as a critical issue with far-reaching socioeconomic implications that extend well beyond environmental concerns. Among the most pressing challenges is its impact on global poverty. This paper projects the potential impacts of unmitigated climate change on global poverty rates between 2023 and 2050. Building on a study that provided a detailed analysis of how temperature changes affect economic productivity, this paper integrates those findings with binned data from 217 countries, sourced from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. By simulating poverty rates and the number of poor under two climate change scenarios, the paper uncovers some alarming trends. One of the primary findings is that the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide could be nearly doubled due to climate change. In all scenarios, Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to bear the brunt, contributing the largest number of poor people, with estimates ranging between 40.5 million and 73.5 million by 2050. Another significant finding is the disproportionate impact of inequality on poverty. Even small increases in inequality can lead to substantial rises in poverty levels. For instance, if every country’s Gini coefficient increases by just 1 percent between 2022 and 2050, an additional 8.8 million people could be pushed below the international poverty line by 2050. In a more extreme scenario, where every country’s Gini coefficient increases by 10 percent between 2022 and 2050, the number of people falling into poverty could rise by an additional 148.8 million relative to the baseline scenario. These findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive climate policies that not only mitigate environmental impacts but also address socioeconomic vulnerabilities.Publication Exports, Labor Markets, and the Environment(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-14)What is the environmental impact of exports? Focusing on 2000–20, this paper combines customs, administrative, and census microdata to estimate employment elasticities with respect to exports. The findings show that municipalities that faced increased exports experienced faster growth in formal employment. The elasticities were 0.25 on impact, peaked at 0.4, and remained positive and significant even 10 years after the shock, pointing to a long and protracted labor market adjustment. In the long run, informal employment responds negatively to export shocks. Using a granular taxonomy for economic activities based on their environmental impact, the paper documents that environmentally risky activities have a larger share of employment than environmentally sustainable ones, and that the relationship between these activities and exports is nuanced. Over the short run, environmentally risky employment responds more strongly to exports relative to environmentally sustainable employment. However, over the long run, this pattern reverses, as the impact of exports on environmentally sustainable employment is more persistent.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication The Asymmetric Bank Distress Amplifier of Recessions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-11)One defining feature of financial crises, evident in U.S. and international data, is asymmetric bank distress—concentrated losses on a subset of banks. This paper proposes a model in which shocks to borrowers’ productivity dispersion lead to asymmetric bank losses. The framework exhibits a “bank distress amplifier,” exacerbating economic downturns by causing costly bank failures and raising uncertainty about the solvency of banks, thereby pushing banks to deleverage. Quantitative analysis shows that the bank distress amplifier doubles investment decline and increases the spread by 2.5 times during the Great Recession compared to a standard financial accelerator model. The mechanism helps explain how a seemingly small shock can sometimes trigger a large crisis.Publication Impact of Heat Waves on Learning Outcomes and the Role of Conditional Cash Transfers(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-14)This paper evaluates the impact of higher temperatures on learning outcomes in Peru. The results suggest that 1 degree above 20°C is equivalent to 7 and 6 percent of a standard deviation of what a student learns in a year for math and reading tests, respectively. These results hold true when the main specification is changed, splitting the sample, collapsing the data at school level, and using other climate specifications. The paper aims to improve understanding of how to deal with the impacts of climate change on learning outcomes in developing countries. The evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer programs can mitigate the negative effects of higher temperatures on students’ learning outcomes in math and reading.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Healthy and Sustainable Diets in Bangladesh(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09)An ideal food system is envisioned to provide healthy diets for people and be sustainable for the environment. Such a food system is required to deliver on these goals even as diets are increasingly and disproportionately comprised of high-fat and/or high-sugar foods vis-à-vis nutritious diets. The ideal “planetary health diet,” as defined in the EAT Lancet report for several countries, presents trade-offs when contextualized at the local level. Using Bangladesh as the case study, this paper examined the change in diets (between 2000 and 2016) and their greenhouse gas emissions over time and compared the nutritional value and environmental impact to two modeled diets: national food-based dietary guidelines and the planetary health diet/EAT Lancet diet. The analysis finds that despite a change of the diet toward the recommended diet, significant gaps remain from a nutritional perspective. Moreover, meeting the dietary guidelines would increase greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10 percent. Compared to the food-based dietary guidelines, the EAT Lancet diet requires dietary patterns to change even more significantly and would increase greenhouse gas emissions by 23 percent. The policy implications and options from the production and demand sides are complex and require assessing multiple trade-offs.Publication Intra-Household Inequality in Food Consumption and Diets in the Philippines(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-09)Most welfare measures, including food expenditure and diet quality, are based on household aggregates and assume an equal or equitable distribution of resources among members within the household. But it is unlikely that resources are distributed equally or equitably within most households. As such, individual food expenditure and diet quality measures, rather than household aggregations, may paint a more accurate picture of intra-household welfare. This paper assesses the disparity between household and individual measurement of food expenditure and diet quality in the Philippines using data from 2013. It finds evidence of intra-household inequality for food expenditure and for diet quality. In particular, for the consumption of starchy staples, meat, fish, and legumes, women and children do not meet the recommended consumption, even within households that, in aggregate, are able to meet the recommended consumption. However, intra-household inequality is not observed under circumstances in which no one in the household meets recommended consumption, as is the case for many food categories in our analysis.Publication Shorter, Cheaper, Quicker, Better : Linking Measures of Household Food Security to Nutritional Outcomes in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Uganda, and Tanzania(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-08)Using nationally representative household survey data from five countries -- three from South Asia (Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal) and two from Sub-Saharan Africa (Tanzania and Uganda) -- this paper conducts a systematic assessment of the correlation between various measures of household food security and nutritional outcomes of children. The analysis, following the universally accepted and applied definition of food security, is based on some of the most commonly used indicators of food security. The results show that the various measures of household food security do appear to carry significant signals about the nutritional status of children that reside within the household. This result holds even after the analysis controls for a wide array of other socio-economic characteristics of the households that are generally also thought to be associated with the quality of child nutrition. If using these food security indicators as proxy measures for the underlying nutritional status of children is of some interest, then the results show that simple, cost-effective, and easy-to-collect measures, such as the food consumption score or the dietary diversity score, may carry at least as much information as other measures, such as per capita expenditure or the starchy staple ratio, which require longer and costlier surveys with detailed food consumption modules. Across five different countries in South Asia and Africa, the results suggest that the food consumption score, in particular, performs extremely well in comparison with all other measures from the perspective of nutritional targeting as well as for monitoring nutritional outcomes.Publication Diet Quality, Child Health, and Food Policies in Developing Countries(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-10)Although the importance of diet quality for improving child health is widely recognized, the roles of environmental factors and the absorption of nutrients for children's physical growth and morbidity have not been adequately integrated into a policy framework. Moreover, nutrient intakes gradually affect child health, so it is helpful to use alternative tools to evaluate short-term interventions versus long-term food policies. This article emphasizes the role of diet quality reflected in the intake of nutrients such as protein, calcium, and iron for children's physical growth. Vitamins A and C are important for reducing morbidity. Children's growth and morbidity affect their cognitive development, which is critical for the future supply of skilled labor and economic growth. Evidence on these issues from countries such as Bangladesh, India, Kenya, the Philippines, and Tanzania is summarized. The supply of nutritious foods is appraised from the viewpoint of improving diet quality. Finally, the roles of educational campaigns and indirect taxes on unhealthy processed foods consumed by the affluent in developing countries are discussed.Publication The Cost of Nutritious Food in South Asia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-08)The high cost of nutritious foods can worsen poor diets and nutrition outcomes especially among low-income households. Yet little is known about the spatial and temporal patterns of the cost of nutritious diets in South Asia, where malnutrition in multiple forms remains high. Using existing food price data from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, two methods are applied to assess the affordability of nutritious foods: Cost of a Recommended Diet (CoRD) and Nutritious Food Price Index (NPI). The analysis finds that the cost of a nutritious diet is 38 percent higher in Sri Lanka using CoRD compared to the cost of a (calorie-based) diet that meets basic food needs, and 15 percent higher in Afghanistan. In addition, CoRD varies across cities due to variability in the price of dairy and vegetables. Comparison of the NPI and the food Consumer Price Index (CPI) indicates that, for some countries, the price of a nutritious food basket varies more by season and has been increasing at a faster rate than the price of a typical food basket. This phenomenon is largely due to the variable cost of vegetables.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication The Bhutan Electric Vehicle Initiative(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-03-25)This report aims to help Bhutan think through various technical and policy issues of introducing electric vehicles in its own context. It analyses a variety of factors that will impact adoption of electric vehicles from technical, market and financial feasibility to consumer awareness and stakeholders’ capacity. It also addresses several policy questions which are at the heart of public debate such as affordability of the government to undertake the program, economic costs and benefits, distributional impact, fiscal, and macroeconomic implications.Publication Business Ready 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-03)Business Ready (B-READY) is a new World Bank Group corporate flagship report that evaluates the business and investment climate worldwide. It replaces and improves upon the Doing Business project. B-READY provides a comprehensive data set and description of the factors that strengthen the private sector, not only by advancing the interests of individual firms but also by elevating the interests of workers, consumers, potential new enterprises, and the natural environment. This 2024 report introduces a new analytical framework that benchmarks economies based on three pillars: Regulatory Framework, Public Services, and Operational Efficiency. The analysis centers on 10 topics essential for private sector development that correspond to various stages of the life cycle of a firm. The report also offers insights into three cross-cutting themes that are relevant for modern economies: digital adoption, environmental sustainability, and gender. B-READY draws on a robust data collection process that includes specially tailored expert questionnaires and firm-level surveys. The 2024 report, which covers 50 economies, serves as the first in a series that will expand in geographical coverage and refine its methodology over time, supporting reform advocacy, policy guidance, and further analysis and research.Publication Groundswell(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03-19)This report, which focuses on three regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America that together represent 55 percent of the developing world’s population—finds that climate change will push tens of millions of people to migrate within their countries by 2050. It projects that without concrete climate and development action, just over 143 million people—or around 2.8 percent of the population of these three regions—could be forced to move within their own countries to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change. They will migrate from less viable areas with lower water availability and crop productivity and from areas affected by rising sea level and storm surges. The poorest and most climate vulnerable areas will be hardest hit. These trends, alongside the emergence of “hotspots” of climate in- and out-migration, will have major implications for climate-sensitive sectors and for the adequacy of infrastructure and social support systems. The report finds that internal climate migration will likely rise through 2050 and then accelerate unless there are significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and robust development action.Publication World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2023-04-25)Migration is a development challenge. About 184 million people—2.3 percent of the world’s population—live outside of their country of nationality. Almost half of them are in low- and middle-income countries. But what lies ahead? As the world struggles to cope with global economic imbalances, diverging demographic trends, and climate change, migration will become a necessity in the decades to come for countries at all levels of income. If managed well, migration can be a force for prosperity and can help achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. World Development Report 2023 proposes an innovative approach to maximize the development impacts of cross-border movements on both destination and origin countries and on migrants and refugees themselves. The framework it offers, drawn from labor economics and international law, rests on a “Match and Motive Matrix” that focuses on two factors: how closely migrants’ skills and attributes match the needs of destination countries and what motives underlie their movements. This approach enables policy makers to distinguish between different types of movements and to design migration policies for each. International cooperation will be critical to the effective management of migration.Publication Deep Trade Agreements and Heterogeneous Firms Exports(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-01)This paper studies the effect of regional trade agreements on firms’ exports. Using detailed information on the content of trade agreements and firm-level exports for 31 developing countries between 2000 and 2020, the analysis shows that the depth of trade agreements matters for the export performance of firms. Moving from shallow to deep trade agreements boosts firms’ exports, on average, by 3.6 percent. In line with models of trade with heterogeneous firms, the trade impact of deep trade agreements depends on firm’s characteristics. The impact is stronger for large firms and firms involved in global value chains and is negative for small firms. Robustness tests and an Instrumental Variable strategy confirm the causal interpretation of the results. These heterogeneous impacts on firms’ exports imply a selection effect of deep trade agreements with significant welfare consequences.