Investigating the Factors Affecting Undernourishment in Iran: an Application of the ARDL Model

The aim of this study is to examine the factors affecting undernourishment in Iran during 1994-2015. To this end, bound test in Auto Regressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) approach is used to check the co-integration of the variables under study. Results reveal that faster economic growth leads to larger improvements in undernourishment rates. Therefore, increased economic growth can accelerate the effects of food policies aimed at reducing undernourishment. In addition, net official development assistance can reduce undernourishment. Moreover, unemployment rate and children proportion have positive effects on the undernourishment in short- and long-run. Accordingly, 1% increase in both unemployment rate and children proportion lead to 0.26% and 0.1% growth in undernourishment, respectively. Hence, improvement of business environment by increasing sustainable employment can reduce the annual undernourishment rates in Iran. On the contrary, the per capita health expenditure in both short- and long-term has no significant effect on reducing undernourishment in Iran. It seems that one of the possible reasons for ineffectiveness of per capita health expenditure on reducing undernourishment is the misallocation of health expenditure in the country. Therefore, the amount and orientation of health expenditure should be revised.