Determinants of Lebanese consumer food expenditures diversity

Abstract

The last century marked a nutrition transition that translated into changed dietary habits and physical activity patterns. The transition came along the expansion of chronic and non communicable diseases taking millions of lives yearly worldwide. Healthy diverse diet is an important factor in maintaining good health. Individuals are recommended to eat from all food groups and keep a balanced diet. In this thesis, we try to look at the socio-economic variables affecting the diversity of the Lebanese consumer food expenditures. We rely on the National Survey of Household condition that has been undertaken jointly between the Central Administration of Statistics, the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs and United Nations Development Program in 2004. The Transformed Gini-Simpson Index is used in order to measure expenditures diversity. Many variables turned out to be significant such as household head and wife education and employment that contributed to higher food expenditures diversity. Furthermore, diversity increases with household size and the number of elderly in the family, while it decreases with the number of dependent and disabled people. Increased expenditures on other goods and services such as education, power, health, communication and transportation was associated with low diversity levels as a greater portion of the household income was not being spent on food.