Percent of the population unable to afford a healthy diet

Definition

The share of the population whose food budget is below the cost of a healthy diet.

Relevance

A healthy diet is considered unaffordable in a country when its cost exceeds 52 percent of income per capita per day. This percentage accounts for a portion of income that can be credibly reserved for food, based on observations that the population in low-income countries spend, on average, 52 percent of their income on food, as derived from the 2017 national accounts household expenditure data of the World Bank's International Comparison Programme (ICP). Income data are provided by the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. A value of zero indicates a null or a small number rounded down at the current precision level.