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Survival Analysis of Food Security in Asian countries
Thesis Abstract:
The study used survival analysis to determine the “warning sign” of food insecurity. This technique examined the effects of covariates on food insecurity among Asian countries in a period of 40 years starting 1961. Sources of data were online databases of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Bank, which include detailed information on 32 Asian countries.
Findings revealed that 21 of 32 (65.62%) Asian countries experienced food insecurity. The stepwise Cox regression was used to select which among the 24 independent covariates are deemed to be significant contributions to the model. Initial run of the SAS code found six covariates to be significant.
Based on the adopted model, at each time point, the West Asian region was found to be more likely to experience food insecurity compared with those countries in the other regions. Furthermore, the incidence of food security for East Asian countries was more likely than those in the other regions. It can also be seen that countries in the lower-middle income group were more likely to reach food insecurity level than those in the other groups. The analysis also showed that high-income countries had high risk of exposure to food insecurity.
Since Cox regression analysis follows the basic assumption of proportionality, the adopted model was tested to find out if it meets this condition. Graphical method and formal test of this assumption were conducted. In the presence of ties, the tieshandling method of Breslow, Efron, Exact, and Discrete were compared with respect to Wald statistics, parameter estimate, hazard ratio, and p-value.
The availability of the determined dataset permitted the assessment of food insecurity levels (i.e., low, medium, or high), which were useful in describing the nature of food insecurity. The analysis determined the variables that play important roles in each stage of food insecurity condition of each country.