Food access and subjective welfare in a developing country

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between food access and welfare is critical in the design of social welfare policies, but the literature on this relationship is scarce. Employing the framework by Van Praag (1968) to a household survey data on Ghana, we investigate the monetary income required by households with inadequate food access to reach a given level of welfare. We observed that households with inadequate food access and those not receiving any support require a higher monetary income to reach the same level of verbal qualification of welfare as their counterparts with adequate food access and receiving support, respectively.