ABSTRACT
Increasingly, rural households in developing countries are shopping for food online, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend. In parallel, dietary guidelines worldwide recommend eating a balanced and healthy diet. With this in mind, this study explores whether online food shopping boosts dietary diversity-defined as the number of distinct food groups consumed-among rural households in China. Because people choose to shop for food online, it is important to account for the self-selection bias inherent in online food shopping. Accordingly, we estimate the treatment effects of online food shopping on dietary diversity using the endogenous switching model with a count outcome variable. The results indicate that online food shopping increases dietary diversity by 7.34%. We also find that education, asset ownership, and knowing the government's dietary guidelines are the main factors driving rural households' decisions to shop for food online.
ABSTRACT
Food security in many developing countries has been threatened by several factors such as unequal land distribution, ineffective land reform policies, inefficient agricultural value chains, and an increasing number of climate disasters. In Nigeria, these threats are exacerbated by rapid population growth and extreme weather events, which have resulted in farmer-herder conflicts in most agrarian communities. This paper examines the differential impacts of the incidence and severity of farmer-herder resource use conflicts on food insecurity of rural households in Nigeria. We employ a two-stage predictor substitution model to estimate survey data collected from 401 rural households in Nigeria. The empirical results show that both the incidence and the severity of farmer-herder conflicts significantly increase food insecurity, and the severity of these conflicts has a larger impact than their incidence. The estimates of the conditional mixed process models confirm the robustness of our results. Additional analysis reveals that the incidence and severity of farmer-herder conflicts positively and significantly affect food insecurity, measured by the number of days with limited varieties of food eaten. Our findings highlight the importance of policy interventions that address ongoing farmer-herder conflicts in affected countries like Nigeria to enhance food security from a sustainable development perspective.
ABSTRACT
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, the number of people shopping online has increased worldwide, and New Zealand is no exception. To date, little is known about the online shopping behaviours of New Zealanders in a pandemic environment. This paper provides the first attempt by exploring the factors affecting online shopping frequency in New Zealand, a country widely regarded as a paragon of excellence for containing the COVID-19 pandemic. A Poisson regression model is utilized to analyze data collected through an online survey between July and November 2020. The empirical results show that people's online shopping frequency is positively affected by payment convenience, competitive pricing, living in the city, and the number of children. The perceived effectiveness of the government's action in combating COVID-19, having poor past online shopping experiences, and being married reduce online shopping frequency.