Income and food price shocks, urban food security, and dietary deprivation: Evidence from Dakar, Senegal

Understanding household food behavior is key to anticipating the welfare effects of economic shocks, particularly in urban areas where COVID-19 disrupted livelihoods and food access. While a growing body of literature documents the pandemic’s effects on food security, few studies explicitly integrate households’ pre-pandemic sensitivity to income and price changes. This study examines household food demand in Dakar, Senegal, and evaluates the simulated effects of COVID-19-related income contractions and food price increases on food security and diet quality. Using statistically matched household surveys, we estimate a censored Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System model with subgroup-specific elasticities and develop a microsimulation model incorporating a heterogeneous Engel transmission channel across six counterfactual scenarios combining three income levels with two food price scenarios. The estimates reveal that households are highly sensitive to price shocks, particularly for staples and animal-source foods, while income shocks transmit partially to food expenditure, with subgroup-specific transmission. Simulated shocks reduce average caloric intake by 17%–36% and lower the food security rate from 52% at baseline to between 40% and 22% depending on the scenario, with statistically significant heterogeneity across sociodemographic groups. The Resilient Diet Deprivation index further reveals a simultaneous deterioration in diet quality through wider and deeper food group deficits, with the contribution of staples and animal-source foods to dietary deprivation rising across all scenarios. These findings underscore the importance of price stabilization policies, nutrition-sensitive interventions, and targeted social protection to strengthen household resilience in urban West Africa.