The use of the Global Food Security Index to inform the situation in food insecure countries

This report is meant to document the use of the Global Food Security Index (GFSI) to inform the food security situation in countries of interest for DEVCO. Since the GFSI is a composite indicator, a clear understanding of its modelling choices is needed to insure a well-informed use of the indicator. The reports is structures as follows. In the introduction of the report, we briefly remind the usual flow of composite indicators and derive the specific implications for measuring countries food security. The second section presents the conceptual framework behind the GFSI and the 2016 results. The assessment of the indicator follows. First, the conceptual framework is examined and the scope of the GFSI is defined. Second, the robustness of the GFSI country ranking is tested against the presence of outliers and missing values, and, against a change of the weighting scheme and aggregation method.