Description:
This paper focuses on understanding the relation between food insecurity and trust. Trust is crucial for well-functioning public institutions, enhances social capital, increases the success of public health interventions, and is vital for economic development. We differentiate between vertical and horizontal measures of trust. Vertical trust is represented as an index of trust in national institutions, while horizontal trust is represented as a measure of trust in friends and family. We examine the relationship between food insecurity and both dimensions of trust for 387,385 individuals in 134 countries using data from the 2014-2017 waves of the Gallup World Poll Survey, which includes the first global measure of individual-level food insecurity. To control for possible endogeneity of food insecurity we use entropy matching methods. We find that food insecurity is associated with a decrease in both measures of trust. We further document heterogeneous effects of food insecurity across economic development rankings. Our results suggest a need for governments to increase food security to bolster public trust, strengthen the social contract, and enhance the effectiveness of future development goals