Browsing by Author "Kling, Robert, committee member"

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Open Access
Bird and rodent pest control in select California crops: economic contributions, impacts, and benefits
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Schein Dobb, Jennifer, author; Loomis, John, advisor; Kling, Robert, committee member; Shwiff, Stephanie, committee member; Anderson, Aaron, committee member
Although numerous factors affect agriculture production, significant yield and quality losses of crops have been attributed to wildlife, insects, and diseases; collectively known as pests. To mitigate pest activity agricultural producers utilize a variety of control tools and techniques including rodenticides, trapping, exclusion, and chemical aversion (Sexton et al., 2007); causing integrated pest management to become an integral part of modern agricultural production. Although crop savings is arguably the most important contribution of pest control, relatively few studies have attempted to quantify prevented crop loss and the economic impacts of these cost savings. This study found that current California control practices as applied to alfalfa, almonds, avocados, carrots, cherries, citrus, grapes, lettuce, melons, peaches, pistachios, rice, strawberries, tomatoes, and walnuts were effective at mitigating crop loss which had the potential to significantly restrict the domestic supply of these agricultural commodities. These practices were shown to lower wholesale prices and were estimated to prevent multi-million dollar losses to California growers, and multi-billion dollar losses to consumers nationwide. In addition to the direct benefits realized through these crop savings, the production and sale of these additional yields further stimulates economic activity within the state. Modeling the forward and backward linkages between California suppliers and consumers enabled monetary flows in secondary markets to be quantified, providing a more conclusive estimate of the total benefits of bird and rodent control in California. This study found that expenditures related to the production of additional yields protected from rodent damage contributed $1.7 billion to California's economy and supported 23,000 jobs, with farm revenue earned on these yields supporting another 11,000 California jobs and contributing nearly $951 million to the state's economy. Findings from this study also estimated that the production of yields protected from bird damage were estimated to contribute $1.39 billion to the state's economy and supported more than 20,000 jobs, with farm revenue earned on these yields supporting another 6,775 jobs and contributing another $565 million to California's economy.
Open Access
Develop a multi-periods fuel treatments allocation model to fragment landscape high hazard fuel patches
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Suksavate, Warong, author; Wei, Yu, advisor; Hoffman, Chad, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
Increased forest fuel loading and continuity have led to more large fires that can potentially cause the loss of property, life and forest resources in certain forest ecosystems. Strategically fragmenting landscape fuel patches with the potential of carrying high intensity or crown fires helps mitigate the future fire risks. This research develops a mathematic integer programming model to optimally locate fuel treatment locations across a landscape for multiple decades. Solutions are aimed at strategically fragmenting high fire hazard fuel patches that support high intensity fires or crown fires. This model can be used to schedule treatments in each stand by reacting to fire ignition probability, potential fire damages to wildland urban interface (WUI), streams, lakes, and the cost of fuel treatment. A set of prototype test cases based on artificial data are used to demonstrate the model performance and support preliminary analyses. This theoretical model can be extended to study a variety of fuel treatment related management concerns across space and time when realistic data become available.
Open Access
Feeling the squeeze: looking for lemons in the market for used banks
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Totten, Gregory, author; Weiler, Stephan, advisor; Thilmany, Dawn, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
This study examines adverse selection and geographic information asymmetry costs stemming from branch network expansion on bank performance. Using a comprehensive dataset covering the period from 1994 to 2022 from the FDIC, this paper investigates how geographic expansion and resulting merger and acquisition (M&A) activity impact bank performance, as measured by Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE), and Non-Performing Loans. The findings reveal that while increasing bank size generally (as measured by total assets) yields benefits, likely due to operational efficiencies, these are accompanied by offsetting costs due to both local information losses resulting from increased geographic branch network size and adverse selection ("lemons") effects stemming from the M&A process. These costs are particularly acute during economic downturns, as evidenced by the interaction effects observed during the Great Recession. The results suggest that information asymmetries, resulting from geographic distance and a lemons effect, are significant in determining bank performance outcomes. This study contributes to the existing literature by reconciling previously mixed findings regarding the net benefits of bank branch network expansion, highlighting the importance of considering both the benefits and costs associated with these strategies.
Open Access
Improve the safety and effectiveness of firelines using Dijkstra's algorithm: model development and implementation during incident
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Liu, Zhiwei, author; Wei, Yu, advisor; Thompson, Matthew P., committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
Multiple spatial indices have been developed by past research to evaluate fire management effectiveness and safety concerns and identify fire suppression operation opportunities. In this study, we will use those indices to directly support fireline construction during fire incident management. To identify firelines that can ensure both suppression effectiveness and responder safety, we introduced a raster-surface-based spatial optimization model based on Dijkstra's algorithm. We modified and implemented this algorithm on a network generated from a spatial index derived raster cost surface, and identified paths with the lowest accumulated cost. We also applied indices specified thresholds to avoid locations that may be too risky to conduct fireline construction. We use a portion of northwest Sierra National Forest in California, the USA, as our study site for demonstration, since this area has been well studied in previous research and has abundant data. We tested our model by improving some of the proposed event lines during the 2018 Ferguson Fire suppression for better safety and effectiveness. Testing results confirmed that our model can achieve management objectives. At the end of this study, we identified the limitations of our model, and proposed future works to improve this model to better support fire management.
Open Access
Internalizing the social costs of smoke emissions into strategic fuels planning models
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Rossi, David J., author; Rideout, Douglas, advisor; Wei, Yu, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member; Kirsch, Andy, committee member
Emissions of fine particulate matter from prescribed burns are a growing concern for wildland fire managers. Stringent air quality regulations and community discern over the emissions from prescribed fire smoke often severely restrict the ability to implement restorative and precautionary fuels treatments. While some extent of emissions are unavoidable, strategic planning can help reduce their impacts. Estimating the cost of smoke and incorporating it into landscape level fire planning may reduce the burden on wildland fire officials confronted with a complex set of choices and constraints. Currently, no decision-support systems are available for strategically incorporating the cost of smoke in fire planning at the landscape level. A decision model is developed to address this void by estimating the value of fire and fuels management at the landscape level by including the cost of smoke in cellular level estimates social returns. By working with locally defined emission standards and translating them into a cost per unit of smoke impact, I was able to internalize the external impact of smoke emissions into a strategic fuels planning model by reprioritizing the optimal selection of landscape grid cells to target for prescribed fire investments. This has the potential to aid the fire planner in analyzing trade-offs for prescribed fire management. In a case study at King's Canyon National Park, emissions standards are used to estimate a relative unit cost of impact (per unit of emissions). The unit cost is subtracted from cellular estimates of marginal social returns to re-prioritize the spatial design of landscape scale fuel treatments.
Open Access
Inventing in an uncertain world: biofuel patents and the anticommons
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2024) Berklund, Annabelle, author; Weiler, Stephan, advisor; Kling, Robert, committee member; Iverson, Terry, committee member; Graff, Gregory, committee member
In 1998 Heller coined the term "anticommons" as a situation in which overlapping property rights lead to underutilization of a resource. Biofuel technologies offer a unique opportunity to explore Heller's hypothesis as there are a dozen different pathways all leading to the same end: a marketable fuel. Ethanol is the most common biofuel on the market today, but this first-generation biofuel comes at a high environmental cost. Advanced biofuels use non-food crops and other waste materials to create a final fuel, which offers hope when considering the environmental impacts of traditional liquid fuels. The patent rights surrounding each fuel type span from a single owner to many owners and vary across technology pathways. These papers explore biofuel technologies over 60 years via granted patents and show that along all technology and ownership patterns the number of assignees on a patent negatively impact follow-on citations. Paper 1, "The rise and fall of innovation in biofuels" was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2016. This paper is a patent landscape of biofuel technologies from 1960 to 2013. In this paper we show an uptick in biofuel patents in the early 2000's, followed by a slow-down post 2008. These trends vary by location and ownership structure, which is explored further in paper 3. Paper 2 builds on the traditional Nordhaus innovation model in which innovation outputs are a function of inputs. The model is expanded to include the potential for fragmented property rights in the form of diffuse patent ownership. The success of an innovation depends on basic research inputs, such as resources available to the researcher and existing patents for the technology in question. A hopeful inventor must consider the time and cost of negotiating rights to gain access to existing patents. And the risk of getting tied up in litigation, before deciding to move forward with a particular idea. As patent ownership becomes more diffuse private outcomes decrease relative to the social optimum and useful ideas are abandoned. Paper 3 uses the data from paper 1 to test the hypothesis of the anticommons empirically. The model uses count of citing patents as a function of various innovation inputs, including cited patents, inventor and assignee counts, time, and other control variables. The data is divided into technological pathways to illustrate how varying amounts of patent assignees impacts follow-on inventions. In all cases the number of assignees negatively impacts the number of follow on citations, suggesting the anticommons is present.
Open Access
Modeling burn probability patterns for large fires
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013) Ziesler, Pamela Sue, author; Rideout, Douglas B., advisor; Reich, Robin, committee member; Wei, Yu, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
I present a set of techniques for modeling burn probability patterns for large wildland fires. The resulting models address an important goal of a large fire risk analysis by estimating large fire burn probabilities. The intent was to develop models of burn probability using data that are widely available or easily calculated and that achieve acceptable predictive performance. Two models were successfully estimated using variables that may be extracted directly or easily calculated from standard GIS layers and other sources and they had `good' predictive ability with AUCs of 0.81 and 0.83. The ultimate intended use for the models is strategic program planning when information about future fire weather and event durations is unavailable and estimates of the average probabilistic shape and extent of large fires on a landscape are needed. Four primary objectives were to: estimate models from historical fire data that are appropriate for strategic program planning, incorporate the effect of barriers to the spread of fires across a landscape, account for the average effect of weather streams and management actions on large fires without using detailed information on weather, fire duration or management tactics, and investigate methods for addressing the spreading, connected nature of large fires on a landscape within a regression model. Models like these can provide finer detail than most landscape-wide models of burn probability and they have advantages over simulation methods because they do not require multiple runs of spread simulation models or information on fire duration or hourly weather events. To model burn probability patterns, I organized historical fire data from Yellowstone National Park, U.S.A. into a set of grids; one grid per fire. I incorporated explanatory variables such as fuel type, topography data and fire season indicators and I captured some spatial relationships through the use of distance, direction and other geometric variables. The data set observations are highly correlated and I investigated two approaches to account for and incorporate this correlation: one employed an autoregressive covariance structure and the other utilized a variable to account for the effects that neighboring cells may have on average burn probability. The two approaches yielded models with estimated coefficients that are consistent with fire behavior theory and that reflect how fires usually behave on the study site landscape. Both models compared well with the predictive ability of other fire probability models in the literature. Based on their predictive performance, this was a successful first attempt at addressing the research objectives and for estimating regression models to predict burn probability patterns for large fires.
Open Access
Pecuniary and non-pecuniary determinants of household recycling behavior
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Hicks, Erin, author; Seidl, Andrew, advisor; Kipperberg, Gorm, advisor; Kling, Robert, committee member
This article examines the effects of both the pecuniary variables (such as prices) traditionally favored by economists and the non-pecuniary variables (such as attitudes and beliefs) preferred by psychologists on household recycling behavior. In order to better explore what decisions households are actually making when they recycle, three dependent variables are examined: recycling rate, waste disposal container size, and time spent recycling. The recycling rate decision is well-explained by a combination of pecuniary and non-pecuniary variables, especially price, difficulty of recycling, and perceived social pressure to recycle. Non-pecuniary variables have the least influence on the how much time respondents spent recycling, which depends primarily on household size. Calculated consumer surplus from recycling activity is $386 per year.
Open Access
Quantifying the economic health cost of exposure to wildfire smoke: four essays in non-market valuation, methodological comparisons, and econometric methods to address endogeneity
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2011) Richardson, Leslie A., author; Loomis, John, advisor; Champ, Patricia, committee member; Seidl, Andy, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
Wildfires and their proximity to urban areas have become more frequent, yet few economic studies have looked closely at the welfare implications exposure to wildfire smoke has on affected individuals. Further, there is a growing concern that human health impacts resulting from this exposure are ignored in estimates of the monetized damages from a given wildfire. Current research highlights the need for better data collection and analysis of these impacts. Using unique primary data, this dissertation quantifies the economic health cost of exposure to wildfire smoke using non-market valuation techniques including the contingent valuation and defensive behavior methods. The individual willingness to pay for a reduction in symptom days as well as perceived pollution levels are quantified and compared to a simple cost of illness estimate. Results indicate that many residents surveyed did not seek medical attention for major health effects, but rather suffered from minor health impacts whose cost is not captured in a cost of illness estimate. As a result, expenditures on defensive activities and the disutility associated with symptoms and lost leisure are found to be substantial for the case of wildfire smoke exposure.
Open Access
Quantitative economics of security: software vulnerabilities and data breaches
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2016) Algarni, Abdullah Mahdi, author; Malaiya, Yashwant K., advisor; Ray, Indrakshi, committee member; Ray, Indrajit, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
Security vulnerabilities can represent enormous risks to society and business organizations. A large percentage of vulnerabilities in software are discovered by individuals external to the developing organization. These vulnerabilities are often exchanged for monetary rewards or a negotiated selling price, giving rise to vulnerability markets. Some of these markets are regulated, while some are unregulated. Many buyers in the unregulated markets include individuals, groups, or government organizations who intend to use the vulnerabilities for potential attacks. Vulnerabilities traded through such markets can cause great economic, organizational, and national security risks. Vulnerability markets can reduce risks if the vulnerabilities are acquitted and remedied by the software developers. Studying vulnerability markets and their related issues will provide an insight into their underlying mechanisms, which can be used to assess the risks and develop approaches for reducing and mitigating the potential risks to enhance the security against the data breaches. Some of the aspects of vulnerability—discovery, dissemination, and disclosure—have received some recent attention. However, the role of interaction among the vulnerability discoverers and vulnerability acquirers has not yet been adequately addressed. This dissertation suggests that a major fraction of discoverers, a majority in some cases, are unaffiliated with the software developers and thus are free to disseminate the vulnerabilities they discover in any way they like. As a result, multiple vulnerability markets have emerged. In recent vulnerability discovery literature, the vulnerability discoverers have remained anonymous. Although there has been an attempt to model the level of their efforts, information regarding their identities, modes of operation, and what they are doing with the discovered vulnerabilities has not been explored. Reports of buying and selling the vulnerabilities are now appearing in the press; however, the nature of the actual vulnerability markets needs to be analyzed. We have attempted to collect detailed information. We have identified the most prolific vulnerability discoverers throughout the past decade and examined their motivation and methods. A large percentage of these discoverers are located outside of the US. We have contacted several of the most prolific discoverers in order to collect firsthand information regarding their techniques, motivations, and involvement in the vulnerability markets. We examine why many of the discoverers appear to retire after a highly successful vulnerability-finding career. We found that the discoverers had enough experience and good reputation to work officially with a good salary in some well- known software development companies. Many security breaches have been reported in the past few years, impacting both large and small organizations. Such breaches may occur through the exploitation of system vulnerabilities. There has been considerable disagreement about the overall cost and probability of such breaches. No significant formal studies have yet addressed this issue of risk assessment, though some proprietary approaches for evaluating partial data breach costs and probabilities have been implemented. These approaches have not been formally evaluated or compared and have not been systematically optimized. This study proposes a consolidated approach for identifying key factors contributing to the breach cost by minimizing redundancy among the factors. Existing approaches have been evaluated using the data from some of the well-documented breaches. It is noted that the existing models yield widely different estimates. The reasons for this variation are examined and the need for better models is identified. A complete computational model for estimating the costs and probabilities of data breaches for a given organization has been developed. We consider both the fixed and variable costs and the economy of scale. Assessing the impact of data breaches will allow organizations to assess the risks due to potential breaches and to determine the optimal level of resources and effort needed for achieving target levels of security.
Open Access
The effect of human capital on total factor productivity growth in the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council countries
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Algarini, Abdullah, author; Bernasek, Alexandra, advisor; Mushinski, David, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member; Kroll, Stephan, committee member
This study is based on the understanding that economic growth in the long run can be achieved not only by increasing accumulation of capital and labor, but also through a sustained growth in total factor productivity (TFP). Therefore, knowledge of factors that explain TFP growth is important in explaining economic growth in the long run. Previous studies emphasize that in general education and health have very important effects on TFP growth, but the effects of these factors have not been widely studied in the AGCC countries. The first step in understanding the problem is to estimate TFP growth by using the Solow Model (1957) and Kalio Model (2012) and the second step is to determine the factors that affect TFP growth by using the Miller and Upadhyay (2000), Khan (2005), and Kalio (2012) models. The results from this study show that the contribution of the accumulation of capital and labor is higher than the contribution of TFP to economic growth over the period 1990-2014 and that it is still low or negative in these countries compared to developed countries. The most positively impactful variables on TFP growth in the AGCC are trade openness, oil revenues, and government consumption, while education, health, manufacturing, and FDI show little if any effect in most AGCC countries. In contrast, Jordan shows a positive effect of education, FDI, and manufacturing on TFP growth that may make Jordan more productive in the long term than AGCC countries.
Open Access
The impact of armed conflict on agricultural production the case of Libya: 1970-2017
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Bdawi, Elbahlul, author; Hoag, Dana, advisor; Graff, Gregory, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member; Boone, Randall, committee member
I examine the long-term impacts of a recent civil war on the agricultural sector within Libya. Due to the associated destruction and market disruption, armed conflict affects the agricultural sector in complex ways including reducing future growth potential by eroding physical and environmental capital. Libya, with its arid climate, low soil fertility and low agricultural productivity, represents an underdeveloped sector that minimizes the inherent complexity to investigate this impact. However, governmental interest in the agricultural sector has been inconsistent as the dominant oil revenue compensates for agricultural deficits through large subsidies. This absence of attention and oversight has resulted in a lack of quality agricultural data, making it difficult to develop beneficial policies to improve sector growth. Based on its simplicity and ease of interpretation, a Cobb-Douglas style production function with Solow-Swan modification is used to characterize the agricultural sector. Though limited, data was collected from FAO and ILO on land, irrigation, fertilizer, machinery, and labor in Libya spanning from 1970 to 2017 covering periods of stability and conflict in order to estimate agricultural sector growth compared to the status quo. To account for the long-term impacts of conflict on growth, inputs are divided into environmental capital, physical capital, and labor. Next, elasticity parameters are estimated through an OLS regression of the Cobb-Douglas production function before and after conflict. A Chow/QLR test is used to confirm the existence and timing of the structural break in the production function arising at the onset of the 2011 conflict. Finally, the impact of post-conflict growth rates are compared using the pre-conflict and conflict regression parameters. Changes in the estimated parameters from the start of the conflict were significant at the 5% level for both the labor and physical inputs, while the environmental elasticity parameter change was not significant. The conflict elasticity estimates were -0.518, -0.803, and -18.9 for the Physical, Environmental and Labor inputs, compared to their pre-con ict values of 0.107, 0.146, and 1.315, respectively. The two key questions are whether the growth path can recover to pre-conflict levels and the associated production losses resulting over the period the sector takes to return to those pre-conflict rates. A preliminary cost-analysis was applied to estimate the required investment to generate an increase in agricultural GDP. The most cost-efficient way to increase the production after conflict (under the assumption of a return to pre-conflict elasticities) is to increase the quantity/quality of fertilizer used. Increasing machinery is the least efficient way to grow the sector GDP. This may reflect two realities in Libya: weak soil quality and inefficient use of machinery, due to diseconomies of size with smaller plots. Lessons from conflicts in other post-conflict countries suggest that a necessary but insufficient condition is the application of good agricultural policies to rebuild the sector. New policies could improve agricultural returns to surpass losses due to conflict if post-conflict productivity is improved. These policies must be combined with good management and reliable data to effect positive changes within the sector. In Libya's case, the primary post-conflict policies should include improving data collection and focusing on increased education and training to enhance the agricultural sector's rehabilitation. I estimated 3 specific scenarios of the post-conflict future consisting of business-as-usual (BAU), a scenario with convergence between the pre-conflict and post-conflict growth paths within 50 years, and another with a convergence of 20 years. Based on the experiences of other post-conflict countries, Libya's agricultural production will likely converge back to the pre-conflict agricultural GDP trajectory within 10-15 years, so long as there is a minimal transition period and agricultural policies are consistent and well managed. The expected cost to the economy is measured by the discounted difference between the pre-conflict trajectory GDP and the estimated post-conflict GDP until the convergence point. For the likely 20 year convergence, there is an estimated opportunity cost of USD2010 25.0 billion. Should the sector return to business-as-usual, the present discounted value of the conflict is USD2010 49.0 billion. The impact of the conflict is lessened by poor productivity before the conflict. It appears that the conflict slowed business-as-usual, but did not significantly erode environmental capital, which would further cripple the recovery.
Open Access
The total economic value of the National Park Service: a contingent valuation method analysis
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2014) Quay, Brian, author; Loomis, John, advisor; Seidl, Andrew, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
This thesis estimates the total economic value (TEV) of avoiding up to 40% cuts to the National Park Service (NPS) park lands and NPS programs. TEV is made up of visitor use and nonuse values (existence can bequest values). We use a Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) survey to estimate benefits generated by the NPS, from a nationwide perspective. Thus, in order to estimate the TEV of the NPS, we use the Turnbull estimator and a logit regression to estimate household-level willingness to pay (WTP) from the data collected in the CVM survey. This study, by nature, is a benefit analysis. It uses stated consumer preferences to estimate aggregate WTP. The mail and internet survey had a response rate of 18 percent with a sample size of 317. Depending on model specification we find conservative lower bound annual household WTP estimates for avoiding up to 40% cuts to NPS park lands of $243.39 and $194.20 for avoiding up to 40% cuts to NPS programs (both values were estimated using the Turnbull estimator), and upper bound estimates of $1,015.10 for avoiding up to 40% cuts to NPS park lands and $430.00 to avoid up to 40% cuts to NPS programs (both values were estimated using a logit model). By summing the above statistics, we find estimated annual household WTP for avoiding up to 40% cuts to the NPS ranging from $437.59 to $1,445.10. Applying the lower bound WTP estimate to 18 percent of the households in the United States (as consistent with the survey response rate, in order to treat nonresponses as 'no' votes), we conservatively estimate the annual TEV of avoiding up to 40% cuts to the NPS to be $9 billion. Using the upper bound household WTP estimate and applying it to the all households equates to an annual TEV of avoiding up to 40% cuts to the NPS to be $167 billion.
Open Access
Three essays on food security and dietary diversity
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Alnafissa, Mohamad, author; Kroll, Stephan, advisor; Pritchett, James, committee member; Costanigro, Marco, committee member; Kling, Robert, committee member
The concern for food security is a cornerstone in the development process for every country. This dissertation is examining food security from three perspectives. First, chapter one explores the most important economic and developmental factors leading to food security and combines these factors in an index to measure the change in food security levels over time for different countries. The next chapter then uses this index to determine whether food security is related to dietary diversity. Finally, the third chapter is a descriptive study of food security in Saudi Arabia. The first part of this research employs principal component analysis (PCA) in order to build a food security index. The objective of the analysis is to provide the variables that build a food security index and the method to weigh them, which allows a national-level comparison of countries from different parts of the world. These data will be used in subsequent parts of this research to study the association between the overall food security index and the four pillars of food security with dietary diversity at the national level in different countries. To build the index, PCA was used to evaluate the contribution of all 31 indicators of the four dimensions of food security (food availability, food accessibility, food utilization, and stability) represented in the FAO data set between 1990 and 2011. Standardized measures of different variables were used to make it easy and reasonable to form one index. The results indicate significant effects for 18 of the 31 variables as indicators of food security. Finally, all of these indicators were combined into a single measure to reflect a multidimensional index of food security for the 59 countries represented in the study. The second chapter of this research addresses one important aspect of food security: dietary diversity. The study assumed that a heterogeneous level of dietary diversity across several countries would be related to their levels of food security. There are several indices that can be used to measure the diversity of food on a countrywide level. This chapter uses the Simpson Index to measure the energy intake diversity of six food groups (rice, wheat products, starchy roots, sugars and sweeteners, fruits and vegetables, and animal products) and the multidimensional food security index, constructed in the first chapter, to represent levels of food security. This case study uses the average data between 2000 and 2011 for 59 countries. In conclusion, these correlations and linear regression models have found that dietary diversity is not affected by levels of multidimensional food security, while the sizes of energy intake increase with levels of food security. It is important to realize that this result does not mean that the diversity of food consumption is less important; it means the tools that could contribute to improve food security do not necessarily contribute to change dietary diversity levels but only change the size of food consumption. The third chapter is a descriptive and qualitative study of food security in Saudi Arabia. The country could reach a good standing of food security compared with other countries according to several food security measurements. This refers to several policies of the Saudi government to invest large revenues from the oil industry to achieve development in the country, with food security representing one aspect of development. In the early stages of development planning, the government targeted to guarantee food supplies and achieve self-sufficiency from agricultural products by supporting domestic agricultural production. This led to the development of domestic production and extensive use of technology in domestic agricultural production, which contributed to more production efficiency. Also, the government supported final food prices to make food easier to access for all residents of different income levels. Unfortunately, some government policies were inefficient and contributed threats to food security such as subsidizing domestic wheat production, which consumed a lot of water. Recently, the government has adopted policies to maintain sustainability in food security such as supporting domestic production for crops that consume less water, supporting overseas investment in agricultural production, increasing the capacity of wheat storage, and reducing the wastage of resources. Even so, food security in Saudi Arabia still faces several challenges that threaten sustainability, such as political instability in the Middle East, water scarcity, reliance on food imports, fluctuations and increases in food prices, food consumption habits, and population growth.