To measure hunger and poverty requires studying the lower tail of distributions, which calls for accurate surveying of both means and variances. Surveys often gather data on respondents for only a short period—taking what is here called a “snapshot”—and although these surveys may be adequate for measuring means and totals, they overstate annual variances and the chronic hunger rate. A new method of deriving chronic hunger estimates from snapshot surveys is proposed, which also allows the transient component of hunger to be identified. This method is demonstrated using a household survey from Myanmar that has repeated observations on households during the year. The transient component of hunger is almost one-half of total hunger. Thus if the transient component is not identified, uncorrected snapshot surveys may measure current hunger but overstate the chronic hunger rate by almost 90%. Results for food consumption in Nigeria are also reported to show that the method matters more broadly; these results highlight the potential for measurement error to distort inferences about the importance of transient welfare fluctuations.

中文翻译：

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从饮食快照测量慢性饥饿

衡量饥饿和贫困需要研究分布的下尾，这需要对均值和方差进行准确调查。调查通常只在短时间内收集受访者的数据——这里称为“快照”——尽管这些调查可能足以衡量均值和总数，但它们夸大了年度差异和长期饥饿率。提出了一种从快照调查中得出长期饥饿估计值的新方法，该方法还可以识别饥饿的短暂部分。使用缅甸的家庭调查证明了这种方法，该调查在这一年中对家庭进行了重复观察。饥饿的短暂部分几乎占总饥饿的二分之一。因此，如果未识别瞬态分量，未经修正的快照调查可能会衡量当前的饥饿情况，但将长期饥饿率高估了近 90%。据报道，尼日利亚的食品消费结果也表明该方法的影响范围更广；这些结果突出了测量误差可能会扭曲关于瞬时福利波动重要性的推论。