Kalle Hirvonen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3710528 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kalle Hirvonen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kalle |
| FAMILY NAME | Hirvonen |
| SIGNATURE | HIRVONEN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | International Food Policy Research Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2057-1612 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The role of social assistance in African crises: A systematic literature review
This systematic review examines the effectiveness of social assistance programmes in protecting households in Africa—a region highly vulnerable to climate change, conflict, and other shocks—during periods of crisis. Despite the significant increase in the number of these programmes over the past two decades, the need for emergency aid remains. Our review focuses on quantitative studies using microdata to assess the impact of these programmes on h…
Estimating the cost and affordability of healthy diets: How much do methods matter
Recently developed cost and affordability of healthy diet (CoAHD) metrics have quickly become mainstream food security indicators. However, published research on the sensitivity of estimation methods is limited. This paper focuses on two important innovations in CoAHD measurement at the global level. First, we develop a demographic scaling factor to adjust healthy diet costs for cross-country differences in age structures, since younger populatio…
Expanding Social Protection Coverage with Humanitarian Aid: Lessons on Targeting and Transfer Values from Ethiopia
While social protection programmes have multiplied over the last two decades across sub-Saharan Africa, these coexist alongside humanitarian assistance in many places, calling for better integration of assistance delivered through the two channels. Progress on this front is hampered by limited evidence of whether and how these historically siloed sectors can work together. Using quantitative and qualitative data from districts covered by Ethiopia…
Child feeding practices in rural Ethiopia show increasing consumption of unhealthy foods
The quality of complementary feeding can have both short- and long-term health impacts by delaying or promoting child growth and establishing taste preferences and feeding behaviours. We aimed to assess the healthy and unhealthy feeding practices of infants and young children in rural Ethiopia. We conducted two rounds of surveys in December 2017/18 in Habru district, North Wello, rural Ethiopia among caregivers of infants and young children (N = …
More than a safety net: Ethiopia’s flagship public works program increases tree cover
More than one billion people worldwide receive cash or in-kind transfers from social protection programs. In low-income countries, these transfers are often conditioned on participation in labor-intensive public works to rehabilitate local infrastructure or natural resources. Despite their popularity, the environmental impacts of public works programs remain largely undocumented. We quantify the impact on tree cover of Ethiopia’s Productive Safet…
Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries have made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely collected by phone. To test the feasibility of collecting consumption data over the phone, we conducted a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia, randomly assigning h…
Institutional mistrust and child vaccination coverage in Africa
INTRODUCTION: Despite considerable improvements in vaccination coverage over the last decade, half of the world's unvaccinated and undervaccinated children are located in Africa. The role of institutional trust in explaining vaccination gaps has been highlighted in several qualitative reports but so far has only been quantified in a small number of high-income countries. METHODS: We matched information on child vaccination status from the Demogra…
Evidence from the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia: Complementarities between social protection and health policies
An optimal diet for planet and people
Understanding delays in the introduction of complementary foods in rural Ethiopia
Age-appropriate breastfeeding and introduction to complementary foods can shape child feeding practices, ensure adequate energy and nutrient intake and prevent linear growth faltering. This study aimed to assess mothers' and health workers' knowledge of timely introduction to complementary foods and evaluate the relationship between delays in complementary feeding and subsequent linear growth. We conducted two rounds of surveys (March/August 2017…
Child growth faltering dynamics in food insecure districts in rural Ethiopia
Child undernutrition disproportionally affects children in low- and middle-income countries. In Ethiopia, both wasting and stunting are serious public health concerns, with high human and economic costs. Understanding the dynamics in ponderal and linear growth faltering is critical to inform the design of innovative interventions that can prevent both wasting and stunting in poor and complex settings. Using two longitudinal studies conducted in 2…
Affordability of the EAT–Lancet reference diet: A global analysis
BACKGROUND: The EAT-Lancet Commission drew on all available nutritional and environmental evidence to construct the first global benchmark diet capable of sustaining health and protecting the planet, but it did not assess dietary affordability. We used food price and household income data to estimate affordability of EAT-Lancet benchmark diets, as a first step to guiding interventions to improve diets around the world. METHODS: We obtained retail…
Assessing Community Health Information Systems: Evidence from Child Health Records in Food Insecure Areas of the Ethiopian Highlands
The incompleteness of the data collected at the health posts poses a challenge for effective implementation of the national health extension program and various complementary programs in Ethiopia
Geography of public service delivery in rural Ethiopia
Remote areas are often characterized by lower welfare outcomes due to economic disadvantages and higher transaction costs for trade. But their poorer situation may also be linked to worse public service delivery. Relying on large household surveys in rural Ethiopia, we explore this by assessing the association of two measures of remoteness - (1) the distance of service centers to district capitals and (2) the distance of households to service cen…
Impact of Ethiopia’s 2015 drought on child undernutrition
In 2015, Ethiopia experienced one of its worst droughts in decades. Using nationally representative data from before and after the event, we do not find evidence that this drought led to widespread increases in chronic or acute child undernutrition. However, further analysis indicates that chronic undernutrition rates did increase in drought-exposed areas that had a limited road network. This finding suggests that the recent investments in road i…
Cash Crops and Food Security: Evidence from Ethiopian Smallholder Coffee Producers
One of the central questions in food policy debates has been the role of cash cropping for achieving food security in low-income countries. We revisit this question in the context of smallholder coffee production in Ethiopia. Using data collected by the authors on about 1600 coffee farmers in the country, we find that coffee income is associated with improved food security, even after controlling for total income and other factors. Further analys…
Animal Sourced Foods and Child Stunting
Stunting affects 160 million pre‐school children globally with adverse life‐long consequences. While work within nutritional science suggests that stunting in early childhood is associated with low intakes of animal‐sourced foods (ASFs), this topic has received little attention from economists. We attempt to redress this omission through an analysis of 130,432 children aged 6–23 months from 49 countries. We document distinctive patterns of ASF co…
Linking taxation and social protection: Evidence on redistribution and poverty reduction in Ethiopia
Although redistribution results from the simultaneous effects of taxes and transfers, analyses of their distributional effects in low‐income countries have largely been undertaken from singular perspectives. This article jointly assesses the distributional effect of taxes and transfers (through social protection) using Ethiopia as a case study. We find that Ethiopia's flagship social protection programme is more effective than income taxation in …
Does Market Access Mitigate the Impact of Seasonality on Child Growth? Panel Data Evidence from Northern Ethiopia
Seasonality in agricultural production continues to shape intra-annual food availability in low-income countries. Using high-frequency panel data from northern Ethiopia, this study attempts to quantify seasonal fluctuations in children’s weights. Consistent with earlier studies, we document considerable seasonality in children’s age and height adjusted weights. While children located closer to local food markets are better nourished compared to t…
Children’s Diets, Nutrition Knowledge, and Access to Markets
Chronic undernutrition in Ethiopia is widespread and many children consume highly monotonous diets. To improve feeding practices in Ethiopia, a strong focus in nutrition programming has been placed on improving the nutrition knowledge of caregivers. In this paper, we study the impact of improving nutrition knowledge within households and its complementarity with market access. To test whether the effect of nutrition knowledge on childrenâ€TMs die…
Seasonality and household diets in Ethiopia
Objective To revisit seasonality by assessing how household diets vary across agricultural seasons in rural and urban Ethiopia. The role of seasonality on the sources and intake of energy (per capita) and household dietary diversity score (HDDS) was analysed. Design The use of nationally representative household-level data collected each month over one year to study the seasonal changes in the sources and intake of energy and HDDS. Setting Eleven…
Can Agricultural Traders be Trusted? Evidence from Coffee in Ethiopia
Risk Sharing and Internal Migration
Over the past 2 decades, more than half the population in our sample of rural Tanzanians has migrated out of their home communities. We hypothesize that this powerful current of internal migrants is changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing. Mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks, on which we collected detailed panel data. By quantifying how shocks and consumption covary across lin…
The African Enigma: The Mystery of Tall African Adults Despite Low National Incomes Revisited
African adult populations are remarkably tall for the low income levels that prevail at the country level. The average African woman is about 158.5 cm tall, whereas the low gross domestic product per capita would lead us to expect a mean height more similar to the shortest populations in the world, about 4 cm shorter. This is the case in spite of the fact that indicators of socioeconomic status and height are positively correlated within each cou…
Going Back Home: Internal Return Migration in Rural Tanzania
While reasons for out-migration are relatively well understood, little is known about why people return to their rural origins. We contribute to filling this gap in the literature by using 19-year tracking data from rural Tanzania to estimate the patterns and determinants of return migration, and we find that return is largely associated with unsuccessful migration. For men, return is linked to poor job-market outcomes at the migration destinatio…
Children’s Diets, Nutrition Knowledge, and Access to Markets
Chronic undernutrition in Ethiopia is widespread and many children consume highly monotonous diets. To improve feeding practices in Ethiopia, a strong focus in nutrition programming has been placed on improving the nutrition knowledge of caregivers. In this paper, we study the impact of improving nutrition knowledge within households and its complementarity with market access. To test whether the effect of nutrition knowledge on childrenâ€TMs die…
Going Back Home: Internal Return Migration in Rural Tanzania
While reasons for out-migration are relatively well understood, little is known about why people return to their rural origins. We contribute to filling this gap in the literature by using 19-year tracking data from rural Tanzania to estimate the patterns and determinants of return migration, and we find that return is largely associated with unsuccessful migration. For men, return is linked to poor job-market outcomes at the migration destinatio…
Impact of Ethiopia’s 2015 drought on child undernutrition
In 2015, Ethiopia experienced one of its worst droughts in decades. Using nationally representative data from before and after the event, we do not find evidence that this drought led to widespread increases in chronic or acute child undernutrition. However, further analysis indicates that chronic undernutrition rates did increase in drought-exposed areas that had a limited road network. This finding suggests that the recent investments in road i…
Risk Sharing and Internal Migration
Over the past 2 decades, more than half the population in our sample of rural Tanzanians has migrated out of their home communities. We hypothesize that this powerful current of internal migrants is changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing. Mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks, on which we collected detailed panel data. By quantifying how shocks and consumption covary across lin…
Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries have made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely collected by phone. To test the feasibility of collecting consumption data over the phone, we conducted a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia, randomly assigning h…
Linking taxation and social protection: Evidence on redistribution and poverty reduction in Ethiopia
Although redistribution results from the simultaneous effects of taxes and transfers, analyses of their distributional effects in low‐income countries have largely been undertaken from singular perspectives. This article jointly assesses the distributional effect of taxes and transfers (through social protection) using Ethiopia as a case study. We find that Ethiopia's flagship social protection programme is more effective than income taxation in …
Can Agricultural Traders be Trusted? Evidence from Coffee in Ethiopia
Estimating the cost and affordability of healthy diets: How much do methods matter
Recently developed cost and affordability of healthy diet (CoAHD) metrics have quickly become mainstream food security indicators. However, published research on the sensitivity of estimation methods is limited. This paper focuses on two important innovations in CoAHD measurement at the global level. First, we develop a demographic scaling factor to adjust healthy diet costs for cross-country differences in age structures, since younger populatio…
More than a safety net: Ethiopia’s flagship public works program increases tree cover
More than one billion people worldwide receive cash or in-kind transfers from social protection programs. In low-income countries, these transfers are often conditioned on participation in labor-intensive public works to rehabilitate local infrastructure or natural resources. Despite their popularity, the environmental impacts of public works programs remain largely undocumented. We quantify the impact on tree cover of Ethiopia’s Productive Safet…
Geography of public service delivery in rural Ethiopia
Remote areas are often characterized by lower welfare outcomes due to economic disadvantages and higher transaction costs for trade. But their poorer situation may also be linked to worse public service delivery. Relying on large household surveys in rural Ethiopia, we explore this by assessing the association of two measures of remoteness - (1) the distance of service centers to district capitals and (2) the distance of households to service cen…
Measuring catch-up growth in malnourished populations
Catch-up growth after early childhood is possible. Puberty seems to offer an opportunity window for recovery
The African Enigma: The Mystery of Tall African Adults Despite Low National Incomes Revisited
African adult populations are remarkably tall for the low income levels that prevail at the country level. The average African woman is about 158.5 cm tall, whereas the low gross domestic product per capita would lead us to expect a mean height more similar to the shortest populations in the world, about 4 cm shorter. This is the case in spite of the fact that indicators of socioeconomic status and height are positively correlated within each cou…
Going Back Home: Internal Return Migration in Rural Tanzania
While reasons for out-migration are relatively well understood, little is known about why people return to their rural origins. We contribute to filling this gap in the literature by using 19-year tracking data from rural Tanzania to estimate the patterns and determinants of return migration, and we find that return is largely associated with unsuccessful migration. For men, return is linked to poor job-market outcomes at the migration destinatio…
Seasonality and household diets in Ethiopia
Objective To revisit seasonality by assessing how household diets vary across agricultural seasons in rural and urban Ethiopia. The role of seasonality on the sources and intake of energy (per capita) and household dietary diversity score (HDDS) was analysed. Design The use of nationally representative household-level data collected each month over one year to study the seasonal changes in the sources and intake of energy and HDDS. Setting Eleven…
Can Agricultural Traders be Trusted? Evidence from Coffee in Ethiopia
Risk Sharing and Internal Migration
Over the past 2 decades, more than half the population in our sample of rural Tanzanians has migrated out of their home communities. We hypothesize that this powerful current of internal migrants is changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing. Mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks, on which we collected detailed panel data. By quantifying how shocks and consumption covary across lin…
Does Market Access Mitigate the Impact of Seasonality on Child Growth? Panel Data Evidence from Northern Ethiopia
Seasonality in agricultural production continues to shape intra-annual food availability in low-income countries. Using high-frequency panel data from northern Ethiopia, this study attempts to quantify seasonal fluctuations in children’s weights. Consistent with earlier studies, we document considerable seasonality in children’s age and height adjusted weights. While children located closer to local food markets are better nourished compared to t…
Children’s Diets, Nutrition Knowledge, and Access to Markets
Chronic undernutrition in Ethiopia is widespread and many children consume highly monotonous diets. To improve feeding practices in Ethiopia, a strong focus in nutrition programming has been placed on improving the nutrition knowledge of caregivers. In this paper, we study the impact of improving nutrition knowledge within households and its complementarity with market access. To test whether the effect of nutrition knowledge on childrenâ€TMs die…
Animal Sourced Foods and Child Stunting
Stunting affects 160 million pre‐school children globally with adverse life‐long consequences. While work within nutritional science suggests that stunting in early childhood is associated with low intakes of animal‐sourced foods (ASFs), this topic has received little attention from economists. We attempt to redress this omission through an analysis of 130,432 children aged 6–23 months from 49 countries. We document distinctive patterns of ASF co…
Linking taxation and social protection: Evidence on redistribution and poverty reduction in Ethiopia
Although redistribution results from the simultaneous effects of taxes and transfers, analyses of their distributional effects in low‐income countries have largely been undertaken from singular perspectives. This article jointly assesses the distributional effect of taxes and transfers (through social protection) using Ethiopia as a case study. We find that Ethiopia's flagship social protection programme is more effective than income taxation in …
Cash Crops and Food Security: Evidence from Ethiopian Smallholder Coffee Producers
One of the central questions in food policy debates has been the role of cash cropping for achieving food security in low-income countries. We revisit this question in the context of smallholder coffee production in Ethiopia. Using data collected by the authors on about 1600 coffee farmers in the country, we find that coffee income is associated with improved food security, even after controlling for total income and other factors. Further analys…
Affordability of the EAT–Lancet reference diet: A global analysis
BACKGROUND: The EAT-Lancet Commission drew on all available nutritional and environmental evidence to construct the first global benchmark diet capable of sustaining health and protecting the planet, but it did not assess dietary affordability. We used food price and household income data to estimate affordability of EAT-Lancet benchmark diets, as a first step to guiding interventions to improve diets around the world. METHODS: We obtained retail…
Assessing Community Health Information Systems: Evidence from Child Health Records in Food Insecure Areas of the Ethiopian Highlands
The incompleteness of the data collected at the health posts poses a challenge for effective implementation of the national health extension program and various complementary programs in Ethiopia
Geography of public service delivery in rural Ethiopia
Remote areas are often characterized by lower welfare outcomes due to economic disadvantages and higher transaction costs for trade. But their poorer situation may also be linked to worse public service delivery. Relying on large household surveys in rural Ethiopia, we explore this by assessing the association of two measures of remoteness - (1) the distance of service centers to district capitals and (2) the distance of households to service cen…
Impact of Ethiopia’s 2015 drought on child undernutrition
In 2015, Ethiopia experienced one of its worst droughts in decades. Using nationally representative data from before and after the event, we do not find evidence that this drought led to widespread increases in chronic or acute child undernutrition. However, further analysis indicates that chronic undernutrition rates did increase in drought-exposed areas that had a limited road network. This finding suggests that the recent investments in road i…
Institutional mistrust and child vaccination coverage in Africa
INTRODUCTION: Despite considerable improvements in vaccination coverage over the last decade, half of the world's unvaccinated and undervaccinated children are located in Africa. The role of institutional trust in explaining vaccination gaps has been highlighted in several qualitative reports but so far has only been quantified in a small number of high-income countries. METHODS: We matched information on child vaccination status from the Demogra…
Evidence from the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia: Complementarities between social protection and health policies
An optimal diet for planet and people
Understanding delays in the introduction of complementary foods in rural Ethiopia
Age-appropriate breastfeeding and introduction to complementary foods can shape child feeding practices, ensure adequate energy and nutrient intake and prevent linear growth faltering. This study aimed to assess mothers' and health workers' knowledge of timely introduction to complementary foods and evaluate the relationship between delays in complementary feeding and subsequent linear growth. We conducted two rounds of surveys (March/August 2017…
Child growth faltering dynamics in food insecure districts in rural Ethiopia
Child undernutrition disproportionally affects children in low- and middle-income countries. In Ethiopia, both wasting and stunting are serious public health concerns, with high human and economic costs. Understanding the dynamics in ponderal and linear growth faltering is critical to inform the design of innovative interventions that can prevent both wasting and stunting in poor and complex settings. Using two longitudinal studies conducted in 2…
Expanding Social Protection Coverage with Humanitarian Aid: Lessons on Targeting and Transfer Values from Ethiopia
While social protection programmes have multiplied over the last two decades across sub-Saharan Africa, these coexist alongside humanitarian assistance in many places, calling for better integration of assistance delivered through the two channels. Progress on this front is hampered by limited evidence of whether and how these historically siloed sectors can work together. Using quantitative and qualitative data from districts covered by Ethiopia…
Child feeding practices in rural Ethiopia show increasing consumption of unhealthy foods
The quality of complementary feeding can have both short- and long-term health impacts by delaying or promoting child growth and establishing taste preferences and feeding behaviours. We aimed to assess the healthy and unhealthy feeding practices of infants and young children in rural Ethiopia. We conducted two rounds of surveys in December 2017/18 in Habru district, North Wello, rural Ethiopia among caregivers of infants and young children (N = …
More than a safety net: Ethiopia’s flagship public works program increases tree cover
More than one billion people worldwide receive cash or in-kind transfers from social protection programs. In low-income countries, these transfers are often conditioned on participation in labor-intensive public works to rehabilitate local infrastructure or natural resources. Despite their popularity, the environmental impacts of public works programs remain largely undocumented. We quantify the impact on tree cover of Ethiopia’s Productive Safet…
Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries have made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely collected by phone. To test the feasibility of collecting consumption data over the phone, we conducted a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia, randomly assigning h…
Estimating the cost and affordability of healthy diets: How much do methods matter
Recently developed cost and affordability of healthy diet (CoAHD) metrics have quickly become mainstream food security indicators. However, published research on the sensitivity of estimation methods is limited. This paper focuses on two important innovations in CoAHD measurement at the global level. First, we develop a demographic scaling factor to adjust healthy diet costs for cross-country differences in age structures, since younger populatio…
Economics (20 works) · Geography (17 works) · Medicine (15 works) · Environmental health (13 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (13 works) · Business (12 works) · Child Nutrition and Water Access (11 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Agriculture (8 works)