analyzing nutritional impacts of policies an empirical study for malawi summary widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate strategies presupposing good knowledge about nutritional impacts of policies little previous work has been carried out in this direction especially with respect to micronutrients we use representative household data from malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption these estimates are applied for policy simulations given multiple nutritional deficiencies income related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition while consumer price subsidies for maize improve calorie and mineral consumption they can worsen vitamin consumption in urban areas

rice production response in cambodia this study estimates rice production response using the cambodia socioeconomic surveys conducted in 2004 and 2007 the results indicate that agricultural productivity is far below its potential and can be increased substantially by using modern technology and inputs such as fertilizer and irrigation our findings also suggest that the cambodian government needs to design its investment strategy to improve rural infrastructure including irrigation transportation and electricity in order to increase its agricultural production and productivity and boost farmers income

quasi and simulated likelihood approaches to censored demand systems food consumption by food stamp recipients in the united states a quasi maximum likelihood estimator is proposed and applied to a censored translog demand system for foods using a sample of food stamp recipients in the united states the procedure produces remarkably close parameter and elasticity estimates to those of the simulated maximum likelihood procedure a two step procedure is also considered but it produces different elasticities demands are found to be price elastic for pork and fish but price inelastic for all other food products gross complementarity and net substitutability are obvious but these cross price effects are much less pronounced than own price and total food expenditure effects copyright 2003 oxford university press

information to guide policy responses to higher global food prices the data and analyses required abstract national decision makers must understand the degree to which their country and population groups within it are exposed to the negative effects of higher global food prices or could exploit new economic opportunities offered by higher prices this paper provides a conceptual overview of the range of data and analyses that will permit leaders and analysts serving them to assess the broad implications of higher global food prices for a country and its population groups what we find is that there are a relatively small number of types of policy responses that governments might take in the face of a food price rise consequently relatively well defined sets of data need to be compiled and types of analyses used by government to generate the information needed to broadly guide efforts to prevent food price increases from becoming crises and to derive any possible benefits international joint action can be employed profitably both to collect this data and to build national capacity to conduct the analyses needed to guide policy formulation and general program design in the face of the risks and the opportunities of higher food prices and to evaluate the effectiveness of those policy responses

weak separability and the estimation of elasticities in multistage demand systems the necessary conditions for multistage budgeting to be at least approximately justified are reviewed and the plausibility of these assumptions i e weak separability and low variability of price indices with utility level are discussed using no further assumptions simple relationships between expenditure and price elasticities in different budgeting levels are derived these results are applied to a three stage model for swedish food consumption and it is shown that the assumptions are not inappropriate restricting the analysis to the last stage of a multistage budgeting process is also shown to lead to considerable errors which could well have policy consequences

conditional and unconditional food demand elasticities in a dynamic multistage demand system this paper estimates conditional and unconditional demand elasticities in a three stage analysis of consumer demand for food and non food items in greece a dynamic version of the aids model is specified and estimated and full system misspecification tests applied correction formulas for price and expenditure elasticities are used to calculate unconditional elasticities from conditional demand sub systems all food items rank as price inelastic deviations between the calculated conditional and unconditional price and expenditure elasticities are found to be significant demonstrating the importance of correcting conditional elasticities before they can be used for policy purposes or welfare analyses

marketed surpluses of agricultural households in sierra leone an agricultural household model is used with household level data from sierra leone to estimate elasticities of marketed surplus for several outputs and for labor with respect to price and nonprice variables positive own price elasticities are found with magnitudes considerably above own price output elasticities changes in household characteristics and production technology also affect marketed surpluses but not always in anticipated directions elasticities are reported for households when grouped by their total expenditure not just for the sample mean the differences are important showing that low expenditure households respond as much as high expenditure households

measuring the costs of children an alternative approach abstract the cost of a child or the general equivalence scale as it is more commonly known is a concept of considerable importance in matters relating to public policy and welfare it has played a crucial part in numerous theoretical and empirical studies relating to poverty income distribution dietary needs income maintenance programs supplementary and child benefits and other forms of social security payments in a welfare state and in assessing the horizontal equity of income taxation in spite of a long tradition of estimating the scale from observed household budget data there remain severe problems in estimation and interpretation of the scales this paper proposes a new methodology for calculating the scale using a framework which is consistent with utility theory and which overcomes the identification problem without having to enforce the arbitrary prior assumptions of recent studies the proposed method allows easy calculation of not only the basic scale parameter but also how it varies with price and reference utility we illustrate the usefulness of the procedure by estimating on u k budget data at two different levels of aggregation and employing two sets of quite different functional forms the results are plausible compare favourably with one another and hence confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed procedure

errors in the numerical assessment of the benefits of price stabilization this paper presents a simple computational procedure for determining a consumer s willingness to pay to have a price stabilization policy implemented numerical simulations are then provided which demonstrate that the commonly used expected surplus measures whether hicksian or marshallian can in fact seriously misstate the true benefits of price stabilization these simulations also illustrate the extent to which the results may be dependent upon the assumptions made implicitly or explicitly regarding the consumer s attitudes toward risk thereby underscoring the need to conduct sensitivity analyses to determine the robustness of cost benefit assessments with respect to these assumptions

rising food prices food price volatility and social unrest can food prices cause social unrest throughout history riots have frequently broken out ostensibly as a consequence of high food prices using monthly data at the international level this article studies the impact of food prices food price levels as well as food price volatility on social unrest because food prices and social unrest are jointly determined data on natural disasters are used to identify the causal relationship flowing from food price levels to social unrest results indicate that for the period 1990 2011 food price increases have led to increases in social unrest whereas food price volatility has not been associated with increases in social unrest these results are robust to alternative definitions of social unrest to using real or nominal prices to using commodity specific price indices instead of aggregated price indices to alternative definitions of the instrumental variable to alternative definitions of volatility and to controlling for non food related social unrest

the distributional impacts of indonesia s financial crisis on household welfare a rapid response methodology analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is an ever more pressing need if policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely affected they need to identify those who have been hurt most and estimate the magnitude of the harm they have suffered they must also respond in a timely manner this article develops a simple methodology for measuring these effects and applies it to analyze the impact of the indonesian economic crisis on household welfare using only pre crisis household information it estimates the compensating variation for indonesian households following the 1997 asian currency crisis and then explores the results with flexible nonparametric methods it finds that virtually every household was severely affected although the urban poor fared the worst the ability of poor rural households to produce food mitigated the worst consequences of the high inflation the distributional consequences are the same whether or not households are permitted to substitute toward relatively cheaper goods households with young children may have suffered disproportionately large adverse effects

sticky prices and purchasing power parity deviations empirical implications abstract this note tests one implication of the hypothesis that purchasing power parity ppp deviations are partly caused by different pricing behavior in goods and asset markets cross country regressions of the variance of ppp deviations on the variance of money supply innovations support the hypothesis

unconditional elasticities in two stage demand systems an approximate solution two stage budgeting postulates that the consumer s utility maximization decision can be decomposed into two steps in the first stage total expenditure is allocated over broad groups of goods in the second stage group expenditures are allocated over elementary commodities in this article we assume that the current weighted true cost of living price indices defined for each broad group of elementary commodities vary only very slightly with sub utility levels hence it is possible to approximate the first stage of a two stage budgeting structure by a maximization problem involving a single price index and a single quantity index for each of the broad groups relationships between conditional and unconditional expenditure and price elasticities are derived within this context

cereal price shocks and volatility in sub saharan africa what really matters for farmers welfare the lack of information as well as some misperceptions about the distinction between the welfare consequences of higher versus more volatile cereal prices has limited the effectiveness of policy interventions during the recent food crises in many developing countries this article proposes an integrated empirical strategy to investigate and compare the different effects of these two phenomena and tests it using nationally representative household survey data from four sub saharan countries results show that the negative impacts of a cereal price increase substantially outweigh the effects of price volatility on household welfare across the entire income distribution the amplitude and the distribution of those effects depend heavily on specific factors such as the weight of food consumption over total expenditure the budget share devoted to cereals the substitution effect among food groups and the relative number of net sellers versus net buyers accessing the market we also show that volatility mainly harms the poorest quintile of the population

on price risk and the inverse farm size productivity relationship abstract the oft observed inverse relationship between farm size and productivity has elicited several explanations having important policy and theoretical implications using advances in the analysis of price risk effects on producer behavior and a simple two period model of an agricultural household that both produces and consumes under price uncertainty at the time labor allocation decisions are made this paper demonstrates analytically that a non degenerate land distribution and price risk can together produce an inverse relationship even absent any of the more common explanations empirical evidence from madagascar confirms the plausibility of this intuitive explanation for the phenomenon

u s protection and intra industry trade the message to developing countries the purpose of this article is twofold first i provide recent evidence on the characteristics of u s intra industry trade with individual countries and regions which can be compared and contrasted with earlier work intra industry trade is defined as the cross hauling of similar goods between trading partners for example the united states exports automobiles to germany and imports automobiles from germany at the same time in the empirical work that follows i use a simple index that equals zero when there is no two way trade in a product and one when exports and imports of a product are equal 2 the present study provides an analysis of recent trade data 1984 and of u s intra industry trade at the four digit sic level that includes intraindustry trade between the united states and other industrialized countries canada japan the european community ec newly industrialized countries brazil mexico and developing regions caribbean basin south america second i examine the possibility that the trade liberalizing effects of intra industry trade are likely to extend to u s trade with developing countries this second issue is particularly important since recent work makes it clear that post kennedy round and post tokyo round protectionism among the industrial countries remains biased against manufactured exports from developing countries 3 the results are significant in three respects first there was consistent evidence that intra industry trade is dominated by cross flows of intermediate goods 4 more specifically intra industry trade occurs primarily in made to order intermediate goods furthermore intraindustry trade occurs predominantly in product lines in which efficient production is small scale production those findings hold not only for

regional trade government policy and food security recent evidence from zambia given heavy dependence on rainfed maize production countries in east and southern africa must routinely cope with pronounced production and consumption volatility in their primary food staple typical policy responses include increased food aid flows government commercial imports and stock releases and tight controls on private sector trade this paper examines recent evidence from zambia using a simple economic model to assess the likely impact of maize production shocks on the domestic maize price and on staple food consumption under alternative policy regimes in addition to an array of public policy instruments the analysis evaluates the impact of two key private sector responses in moderating food consumption volatility private cross border maize trade and consumer substitution of an alternate food staple cassava for maize the analysis suggests that given a favorable policy environment private imports and increased cassava consumption together could fill roughly two thirds of the maize consumption shortfall facing vulnerable households during drought years

estimating food demand in paraguay from household survey data we estimate a food demand system in paraguay based on the 1997 national household survey considering 12 food categories to obtain demand elasticity estimates from household survey data accounting for quality effects measurement errors and censored observations price indexes are obtained from ordinary least squares predictions of changes in unitary values caused by spatial and temporal variations and the two step estimation procedure shonkwiler and yen 1999 is applied our approach yields reasonable estimates of combined quantity and quality responses with respect to price results suggest distinct consumption behavior in urban and rural areas particularly for chicken eggs dairy and fats and oils which are likely because of differences in the food distribution system and availability of nonmarket food sources

rice prices and income distribution in thailand a non parametric analysis rice is a staple crop in thailand significantly entering both household production and consumption this paper examines the effect of rice prices on the distribution of real income across households taking into account household characteristics and geographical location the data set is a large scale survey of 11 893 households simple nonparametric techniques for regression and density estimation are used these methods depend on few assumptions and generate flexible graphical results that are directly informative about the problem at hand the main results are that higher rice prices should benefit all rural households but the largest benefits accrue to rural households in the middle of the income distribution copyright 1989 by royal economic society

rising food prices and undernourishment a cross country inquiry households welfare in developing countries has been hit by dramatic food prices increases which occurred between 2005 and 2008 in this paper we adopt a partial equilibrium approach to analyze the short time effects of a staple food price increase on nutritional attainments as a measure of welfare the analysis consists of first approximating complete food demand systems and then performing household level micro simulations instead of focusing on a single country profile we provide a more complete snapshot by comparing the evidence through a cross country assessment made possible by the use of nationally representative household surveys comparability is assured by the adoption of the same methodological choices in the treatment of the micro data we find that food price spikes not only reduce the mean consumption of dietary energy but also worsen the distribution of food calories further deteriorating the nutritional status of populations we also discovered that access to agricultural land plays a significant role in ensuring adequate nutritional attainments in rural areas and surprisingly even in urban areas

measurement of consumer gains from market stabilization for most cases of practical significance in which partial equilibrium analysis is appropriate there is little difference between exact measures of consumer gains from market stabilization and approximations such as expected change in marshallian or hicksian consumer surplus careful specification of the nature of stabilization is more crucial than the choice of welfare measure it is important to represent correctly the demand curvature and supply response and to determine whether general equilibrium responses can be ignored in any event an improved analytical approximation and a simple numerical method for calculating the exact measures make it unnecessary to rely on suspect measures

a comment on the welfare impacts of commodity price volatility evidence from rural ethiopia this comment discusses the robustness of the policy implications of bellemare barrett and just s paper the welfare impacts of commodity price volatility evidence from rural ethiopia 2013 bellemare barrett and just present a theoretical and empirical approach to the estimation of willingness to pay for food price stabilization that accounts for the covolatility of prices making a significant contribution to the literature however in the course of applying their model to data from rural ethiopia the authors make an empirical assumption in the treatment of zero valued income households that produces a distortion in the distribution of household budget shares this comment identifies the consequences of this assumption for the estimated relationship of poor and wealthy households willingness to pay for food commodity price stabilization and shows the results one would obtain under a different distribution preserving treatment of zero valued income the key finding is that the distributional benefit incidence of food price stabilization found in bellemare barrett and just 2013 is reversed when the budget share of marketable surplus is calculated over observed as opposed to mean household income where available

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase