Abstract
Using involvement in voluntary associations and the density of community groups as measures of social capital, the paper empirically examines its potential interlink with food security. To account for the potentially endogenous nature of individual social capital, we used a multi-equation recursive modeling framework allowing for contemporaneous correlation across equations. We demonstrate that strengthening social capital can be an effective way of combatting extreme food insecurity. However, our empirical findings also highlight a cautionary note, that lumping all forms of social capital into one unit to force a uniform narrative about its impacts can be misleading. Using cross sectional household data from food-impoverished western Nepal, we show that participation in finance-related associations has a direct impact on hunger mitigation, whereas associations that have informational or other roles do not have such an impact. Our findings suggest that community level social capital may have “environmental” effects that can lead to positive food security outcomes. On the other hand, while involvement in informational associations has no direct significant impact on the prevalence of hunger, we found that they help to improve the nutritional quality of diets, thereby circuitously leading to improvements in the food security status of women in Nepal.
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Notes
Many studies categorize social capital into three types: bonding, bridging, and linking. This study does not adhere to such classification for reasons discussed.
At an individual/household level, community groups can provide their members with social support, information, and resources, and promote healthy behavior. This is referred to as the “compositional effect” of social capital.
At a community level, social cohesion can promote overall wellbeing of the population, which is known as the “environmental effect” of social capital. Cohesive communities can coordinate collective action, have better access to resources, and can invite more external programs.
The 7-point scale was converted to a 4-point measure for hunger-scale for two reasons: 1) ‘Bins’ with insufficient observations may result in the violation of proportional odds assumption that is required to run ordered logit regression models. To remedy this, we lumped related categories together to ensure that each bin had sufficient observations. Note that results are robust to alternate bin-assignments: for instance, when we assign 5-6 as extreme hunger instead of 4-6. 2) A 4-point scale better facilitates interpretation of hunger than the 7-point scale. The scale we adopted allows us to discuss severity of hunger in terms of no-low-moderate-severe levels, which a 7-point scale does not allow.
Our instruments included investments in social capital (two variables: time allocated for social activities, community events) and social skills (three variables: level of comfort in public speaking for decision, advocacy, and protest).
For example: Although the variables comfort in speaking publicly to protest and time spent in social activities have higher correlation-coefficient when paired with individual social capital versus with hunger variables, the correlation (in absolute terms) is still not sufficiently strong (9% and 17% compared with ISC compared to 2% and 12% with outcomes) to justify the use of two-stage IV approaches.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Richard Santos, Kira Villa, and UNM-Economics Research Seminar participants for their feedback. The paper has also benefited from valuable comments from Derrill Watson (senior editor of Food Security) and two anonymous peer reviewers.
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Rayamajhee, V., Bohara, A.K. Do voluntary associations reduce hunger? An empirical exploration of the social capital- food security nexus among food impoverished households in western Nepal. Food Sec. 11, 405–415 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-019-00907-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-019-00907-0