The effects of outdated data and outliers on Kenya’s 2019 Global Food Security Index score and rank

Abstract

The heterogeneity of food security indicators and the lack of consensus on comparing and ranking countries have driven international organisations to build composite indicators (Santeramo 2015). Composite indicators are aggregated indexes comprising individual indicators and weights, each representing an indicator’s relative importance based on a given underlying model (Nardo et al. 2005). Policymakers often rely on composite indicators as useful diagnostic tools for prioritising policies (Turan et al. 2018), while in benchmarking exercises, poor-performing countries also learn from better-performing countries. Moreover, composite indicators are essential for public communication due to ease of interpretation (Santeramo 2017).