The Impact of Political Risk and Institutions on Food Security

Abstract

The most challenging problem in today’s world is food insecurity, an estimated approximately 832 million people around the world suffer from a lack of adequate and healthy food on a regular basis for their life. This problem is likely to intensify around the world due to high political risk and weak institutions. Hence, this study utilizes the country-level data, covering 124 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean between 1984-2018 to examine the impact of political risk and institutions on food security, proxied by Dietary energy supply (DES). We have finalized the System-GMM from Pooled-OLS, Fixed-effect, Difference-GMM, and System-GMM, to recover the potential endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity of the independent variables. Our outcomes provide supportive evidence that internal and external conflicts, socioeconomic conditions, corruption, military in politics, religious tensions, ethnicity tensions, and poor quality of bureaucracy worsen food security in developed and developing countries. While government stability, the role of law and order, democratic accountability, and investment profile affect the food supply positively and significantly.