The World Bank has invested in infrastructure in developing countries for decades. This investment aims to reduce the isolation of markets, reducing both seasonality and variability in food availability and food prices. Here we combine city market price data, global distance to port, and country infrastructure data to create a new Isolation Index for countries and cities around the world. Our index quantifies the isolation of a city from the global market. We demonstrate that an index built at the country level can be applied at a sub-national level to quantify city isolation. In doing so, we offer policy makers with an alternative metric to assess food insecurity. We compare our isolation index with other indices and economic data found in the literature. We show that our Index measures economic isolation regardless of economic stability using correlation and analysis.
Highlights
► We used publically available global infrastructure and geographic datasets to derive an index. ► We tested the validity of our metric using both country and local economic data. ► We demonstrated how the country metric can be used to measure city isolation. ► Highly isolated cities had the largest differences between local and global prices.
