The aim of this paper is to fill the gap of rigorous evidence on the short-term variations of food (in)security in response to business cycle fluctuations and explore the role of relevant policy instruments to address jumps in food insecurity. The literature on the micro-level determinants of household food security has abundantly documented the role of household income, education, ethnicity, access to social welfare and so on (Gundersen et al., 2011; Akter and Basher, 2014; Tiwari et al., 2016). On the other hand, the macro-drivers of national food security have received much less attention. Few studies have looked into the effects of aggregate economic factors like GDP or the general level of food prices on food insecurity in single countries and only a handful have done so at a global level using cross-country data (Gregory and Coleman-Jensen 2013; Nord et al., 2014; Heady, 2013; Soriano and Garrido; 2016).
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