How Important is Food Security in Reducing Poverty?
Food security is one of the most critical problems for those in poverty, which make up over 50 million people in the US. Over the last 70 years, various government policies have been enacted to help address this issue. A collection of research pioneered by the economist Hilary Hoynes at UC Berkeley over the last decade analyzes the effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the largest public benefit program in the US available to anyone under 130% of the poverty level (household incomes of $25,000 or lower for families of 3-4). SNAP recipients are given vouchers which can be used at grocery stores to buy food and infant formula. They cannot be used to purchase alcohol, vitamins, supplements, or other non-food items.
Hoynes and her team of researchers found that the introduction of SNAP caused recipients to increase food purchases by 20% overall (Hoynes and Schaebach, 2009), but importantly, this also improved infant health, as measured by an increase in birth weight by 7% for the lowest quartile. Changes in this cohort are important because they are closely linked to other complications (Almond et al., 2011).
The authors are able to claim causal effects of the SNAP program as it was introduced to certain counties before the others throughout the years of 1962 to 1975. Critically, the counties that first received SNAP vouchers were similar in demographic makeup to those who did not receive SNAP. This allows for counties to be treated as randomly assigned to SNAP.
But what about the long-term effects of the policy? If a policy has long-run effects, negating them in any analyses might severely underestimate the benefits they bring about.
In order to answer this question, Hoynes links numerous administrative datasets with over 17 million individuals born from 1950 to 1980 and follows them over most of their lifetimes. This framework of causal inference, combined with an extraordinarily large and detailed longitudinal dataset, allows her team to determine the causal impacts of the SNAP rollout on health, education, income, and incarceration of adults in poverty and their children.
The results show a striking effect on SNAP benefits for children at the earliest ages, even well before those children are born. This is due to the nutritional benefits gained to the mothers who are now receiving food that they otherwise would not have obtained. The human capital index is a composite index that integrates years of schooling, graduating from high school, years of college, college graduation, and professional degree graduation. Economic self sufficiency index includes whether the individual is in the labor force, worked the previous year, weeks worked last year, hours per week worked, labor income, and income to poverty ratio. The neighborhood quality index includes the value of the individual’s home/apartment, home/apartment ownership, a measure of single-headed family homes, a measure of homes under the poverty line. The disability index is a summary measure that encapsulates work disability, cognitive difficulty, vision/hearing disability, and ability to live independently.
She finds large and statistically significant positive effects of the program: the outcome measure is the incidence of “metabolic syndrome” (a cluster of conditions including obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes) for babies in utero and in early childhood. It also goes on to increase adult incomes for the treated group, by 7%. There is also a decrease in mortality in young adulthood by 11%. Most of all, this analysis shows that 13% of those who receive SNAP enrollment went on to be lifted out of poverty, which is the highest effect of any public benefit program (Bailey et al. 2023).
What about the benefits and the costs?
The cost of SNAP is roughly $3,000 per family per year for the government. This includes both grocery vouchers provided as well as the administrative costs of running the program, for each of the over 40 million recipients in the US.
The benefits have to be translated into dollars and then summed up for increased health, increased longevity, and increased incomes. When this is all tallied up, we get a whopping $180,000 present value of benefits for each family. That is, for each dollar spent in SNAP, the return to society is 60 times that dollar. The reason this value is so high is that large gains to health accrue throughout a child’s life. The SNAP program is one of the most successful poverty alleviation policies in US history.
This work speaks to the necessity of food security, particularly for expectant mothers, as well as for children at critical periods of their development (0 to 5 years old). Lumiya scours the body of relevant academic literature to uncover analyses like this to evaluate the efficacy of government and non-profit programs.
**SNAP was formerly known as the Food Stamp Program
References
Almond, D., Hoynes, H. W., & Schanzenbach, D. W. (2011). Inside the War on Poverty: The Impact of Food Stamps on Birth Outcomes. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 93(2), 387–403. [DOI: 10.1162/REST_a_00089]
Hoynes, H. W., & Schanzenbach, D. W. (2009). Consumption Responses to In-Kind Transfers: Evidence from the Introduction of the Food Stamp Program. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(4), 109-39.
Hoynes, H. W., Schanzenbach, D. W., & Almond, D. (2016). Long-Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net. American Economic Review, 106(4), 903-34.
Bailey, M., Hoynes, H., Rossin-Slater, M., & Walker, R. (2023). Is the Social Safety Net a Long-Term Investment? Large-Scale Evidence From the Food Stamps Program. The Review of Economic Studies. [DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdad063]
