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

food insecurity poverty and the malawian starter pack fresh start or false start abstract chronic food insecurity and chronic poverty are closely related in malawi since independence in 1964 national food security has been a key policy objective however until the 1990s less emphasis was placed on the household dimensions of food security and its links with chronic poverty in the last decade a number of initiatives have been used in malawi to tackle the issue of household food insecurity one of the most controversial has been the starter pack programme launched in 1998 initially consisting of a free handout of packs of improved maize seed legumes and fertiliser to every small holder farm household in malawi the scheme under donor pressure was subsequently scaled down to become a form of targeted social safety net programme this paper analyses the strengths and weakness of both the original programme and its scaled down version and assesses the reason for the considerable opposition to the programme from malawi s donor community although starter pack is no longer operative in malawi the malawian experience is used to derive lessons for other countries where household food insecurity is an important dimension of chronic poverty

the economics of iron deficiency abstract this paper examines the evidence for a causal relationship between iron deficiency and a variety of functional consequences with economic implications motor and mental impairment in children and low work productivity in adults to the extent that we can be confident that iron deficiency does cause a consequence with economic implications this effect is quantified in economic terms illustrative calculations for 10 developing countries suggest that the median value of annual physical productivity losses due to iron deficiency is around 2 32 per capita or 0 57 of gdp median total losses physical and cognitive combined are 16 78 per capita 4 05 of gdp using a cost of 1 33 per case of anemia prevented from one of the few effectiveness studies of national fortification allows us to calculate the benefit cost ratio for long term iron fortification programs the median value is 6 1 for the 10 countries examined and rises to 36 1 including the discounted future benefits attributable to cognitive improvements this paper improves on previous work by including a much more thorough survey of the quantitative magnitudes involved and by incorporating effects of iron deficiency on cognition however more research is needed to verify the accuracy of the assumptions needed for this type of analysis

alternative models of restructured electricity systems part 1 no market power different equilibrium concepts have been proposed by various authors schweppe et al hogan et al chao and peck wu et al to analyse competitive electricity systems we establish correspondences between these different models through a single framework and provide additional interpretations of these equilibrium concepts this unifying conceptual view also provides a computationally feasible approach to simulate the market it also opens the way to the modeling of some imperfect markets

nonparametric and parametric analysis of calorie consumption in tanzania abstract the empirical literature on the demand for calories in developing countries suggests mixed results regarding the role of income and other socioeconomic characteristics on calorie demand this study employs both nonparametric and parametric methods to examine the impact of household expenditure and other socioeconomic variables on household demand for calories in tanzania using recent survey data the parametric methods include estimation strategies that ensure consistent estimates in the presence of behavioral endogeneity and measurement error under each estimation strategy we employ we find a strongly significant and positive relationship between household expenditure and calorie demand lending support to conventional wisdom that income growth can alleviate inadequate calorie intake the results also show a negative and significant relationship between food prices and calorie demand suggesting that effectively targeted food subsidies for very poor households may play a role in improving their calorie intake

the impact of maize price shocks on household food security panel evidence from tanzania abstract using three waves 2008 09 2010 11 2012 13 of the tanzanian national panel survey this study investigates the impact of maize price shocks on household food security between 2008 09 and 2012 13 calorie intake stagnated for urban households yet sharply deteriorated for rural households the latter was driven by a significant decline in the consumption of the major staple maize which showed strongest price hikes among all major food items fixed effects regressions indicate a clear negative relationship between maize prices and average household energy intake almost all population groups were found to be negatively affected by maize price shocks with rural landless households being the most vulnerable group in particular a 50 percent rise in maize prices decreases caloric intake for rural urban households on average by 4 4 5 4 percent and for rural landless households by 12 6 percent results further indicate that subsistence agriculture can act as an effective strategy to insure against food price volatility

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

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

distributional effects of taxing transport fuel this paper1 takes as its starting point the observation that fuel prices and thus taxes are important for good management of climate change and other environmental problems to economists this should be no surprise yet it seems that the role of fuel taxation as an instrument of climate policy has not been fully appreciated it is however one of the few policy instruments that since several decades has actually reduced fuel consumption appreciably thanks to taxation mainly in europe and japan carbon emissions are considerably lower than they would have been otherwise in future where carbon emissions are to be cut drastically this instrument will be crucial there is however much opposition to the instrument this opposition uses various arguments for instance that fuel taxes hurt the poor since they are strongly regressive we however find that the choice of country and methodology turns out to be of great consequence we study seven european countries france germany united kingdom italy serbia spain and sweden and do find some evidence of regressivity but the evidence is very weak it does not apply when lifetime income is used and it does not apply to the poorest country in the group the best one line summary is probably that the tax is approximately proportional

policies for a sustainable biomass energy sector in malawi enhancing energy and food security simultaneously summary biomass energy still dominates the energy sector in sub saharan africa in particular as the main cooking energy source in rural and urban areas the strong linkages to food security and the environment place biomass energy at the heart of sustainable development a fact that is largely ignored by policy makers in favor of modern energy at the same time population and gdp growth are exacerbating already existing supply demand imbalances in highly populated countries such as malawi these trends make it imperative to identify policy interventions that promote sustainable biomass energy while simultaneously considering linkages with other sectors we use new data on demand and supply for biomass energy in malawi and develop a model that estimates fuelwood demand based on actual diets and project demand in future years we simulate how demand side interventions in the form of improved cookstoves affect biomass demand and built a behavioral model to analyze the potential of agroforestry for promoting a sustainable biomass energy sector in malawi our findings show that policy measures aimed at increasing cooking efficiency are not enough to decrease demand for cooking energy due to high population growth supply side interventions like agroforestry on the other hand will not only increase sustainable supply but can also enhance food security and protect the environment we find that biomass energy can be inherently sustainable and should be an integral part of every energy sector strategy in developing countries as well as of the sustainable development goals

household food demand in rural china this article explores rural household food consumption behaviour in china using a large household data set from jilin province data are classified into four main food groups grain vegetable products animal products and other foods a household food demand system incorporating four household characteristics is estimated using an la aids model assuming a three stage budgeting procedure expenditure elasticities for a range of food groups are estimated with a particular focus on animal products the inclusion of household characteristics did not have a big impact on the elasticity values in any of the three stages of the budgeting process the total expenditure elasticity for grain stage ii was 0 64 suggesting substantial future growth in household demand for fine grains such as rice and wheat as per capita incomes continue to grow in rural areas the highest conditional and total expenditure elasticity values were for the animal products stage ii group 1 22 and 0 76 respectively within this

public acceptance for environmental taxes self interest environmental and distributional concerns abstract while strongly recommended by economists it has often been politically difficult to impose taxes on externalities there is a substantial literature on public attitudes towards environmental taxes there has however been few comprehensive attempts to understand attitudes towards environmental taxes the main research question in this paper is which factors influence support for fuel taxation we propose a model of attitudes towards fuel taxation and test this model as well as more specific hypotheses using data from a representative survey of the adult norwegian population our results suggest that support for fuel taxation is best predicted by beliefs about environmental consequences followed by beliefs about consequences to others beliefs about consequences to self self interest is the factor that explains the least variation in support for fuel taxation the academically interesting result that support cannot be well explained without capturing a broad range of motivational factors is also highly policy relevant it implies that there is no magic formula for increasing public support for environmental taxes there are however some issues which can be addressed trust in how well the government spends the revenue and the perception that taxation does very little to change behaviour and thus to reduce environmental problems

quality quantity and spatial variation of price this paper develops and implements a method for estimating price elasticities of demand using cross sectional household survey data geographically clustered households report unit values which when corrected for quality effects and for measurement error indicate the underlying spatial variation in prices and can be matched to variation in demand patterns a simple model of quality choice is proposed while the correction for measurement error exploits the clustered design of such surveys data from a 1979 household survey from the ivory coast are used to estimate price elasticities for beef meat fish cereals and starches copyright 1988 by american economic association

demand systems estimation with microdata a censored regression approach demand systems estimation increasingly makes use of household level microdata mainly to measure the effects of demographic variables data based on these household expenditure surveys present a major estimation problem for any given household many of the goods have zero consumption implying a censored dependent variable techniques which do not take this censored dependent variable into account will yield biased results we utilize a censored regression approach that is computationally simple consistent and asymptotically efficient the results are then presented and compared with those obtained using an uncensored technique

what do we know about carbon taxes an inquiry into their impacts on competitiveness and distribution of income abstract the kyoto protocol to the united nations framework convention on climate change unfccc has set legally binding emissions targets for a basket of six greenhouse gases and timetables for industrialised countries it has also incorporated three international flexibility mechanisms however the articles defining the flexibility mechanisms carry wording that their use must be supplemental to domestic actions this has led to the open debates on interpretations of these supplementarity provisions such debates ended at the resumed sixth conference of the parties cop to the unfccc held in bonn july 2001 and at the subsequent cop 7 in marrakesh november 2001 the final wording in the bonn agreement reaffirmed in the marrakesh accords at least indicates that domestic policies will have an important role to play in meeting annex b countries emissions commitments carbon taxes have long been advocated because of their cost effectiveness in achieving a given emissions reduction in this paper the main economic impacts of carbon taxes are assessed based on a review of empirical studies on existing carbon energy taxes it is concluded that competitive losses and distributive impacts are generally not significant and definitely less than often perceived however given the ultimate objective of the framework convention future carbon taxes could have higher rates than those already imposed and thus the resulting economic impacts could be more acute in this context it has been shown that how to use the generated fiscal revenues will be of fundamental importance in determining the final economic impacts of carbon taxes finally we briefly discuss carbon taxes in combination with other domestic and international instruments

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

issues relating to the un system of national accounts and developing countries abstract the recent revision of the united nations system of national accounts sna represents improved harmonization of the international trade balance of payments government finance and monetary data collected by national and international statistical agencies although such harmonization is welcomed by the developing countries a number of other major unresolved issues remain specifically the sna has not solved problems relating to 1 delineation of the formal and informal sectors of an economy 2 appropriate treatment of market and non market production and 3 satisfactory analysis of sector saving and capital formation and 4 harmonization of household sector macrodata with household survey microdata

a cross section analysis of household demand for food and nutrients in tanzania abstract undernutrition and malnutrition are still problems of unacceptable proportions in many developing countries however the debate on the roles of income and other socio economic variables such as women s education and household size on food and nutrient demand continues this study examines the demand for food and nutrients amongst households in tanzania using recent survey data a quadratic almost ideal demand system quaids is employed to estimate price and expenditure elasticities as well as the impact of socio economic variables on food demand patterns a moment based instrumental variable approach is then used to analyse the determinants of nutrient demand the results show that income and other socio economic variables exert significant effects on the demand for food and nutrients the estimated expenditure elasticities for the nutrients range from 0 307 for iron to 1 26 for vitamin b12 the elasticities are higher for those micronutrients that are consumed through animal products and lower for those micronutrients that are mainly obtained through staple foods these results reflect the higher expenditure elasticities for meat fish eggs milk and milk products as well as fruits and vegetables relative to cereals and pulses reinforcing the assertion that the demand for vitamins a and b12 as well as calcium and zinc will increase with rising income

the effect of income on demand for food in poor countries are our food consumption databases giving us reliable estimates abstract cross section estimates of income elasticities for food staples in the aggregate based on quantity information from household food expenditure surveys are often in the 0 3 0 6 range it is shown that differences in per capita calorie intakes across income groups implied by these income elasticities are grossly inconsistent with observed differences in bodyweights moreover time series data frequently indicate that national per capita consumption of food staples in the aggregate remains constant even as per capita gross national product rises substantially cross section income elasticity estimates are biased upwards due to the failure of food expenditure surveys to undertake an accurate accounting of food transfers from high to low income groups biases which are not generated by survey techniques which record food intakes directly

effect of changes in population density and crop productivity on farm households in malawi this study examines the ex ante farm household effects of changes in family size yield potential and yield gaps using a farm household simulation model that reflects the economic and biophysical conditions of central malawi disparities between growth in human population and crop yields present challenges for farm household crop production and income in sub saharan africa we focus on the effect of growth in yield potential and a more efficient use of livestock manure as approaches to improving crop production and incomes in the face of looming population pressures our results suggest that even without considering climate change expected changes in population density and crop prices in 2050 mean that per person crop production and income may fall by 21 compared to 2013 values if yield potential and yield gaps remain constant however per person crop production and income could increase in 2050 by 8 compared to 2013 values if 1 growth rates of yield potential rise for maize by 1 13 each year and for legumes rise by at least 0 4 each year and 2 farmers use livestock manure more efficiently our foresight approach to considering crop production at the farm household scale supplements macro scale analyses of the production dimension of food security

is the gasoline tax regressive in the twenty first century taking wealth into account abstract poterba 1991a has much influenced the literature on the distributional effects of carbon pricing poterba argues that the incidence of energy environmental taxes across households is better appreciated if the relative tax burdens are measured against total expenditure interpreted as a proxy for lifetime income instead of annual income this way however since the distribution of total expenditure is structurally more uniform the incidence of energy price increases is always less regressive than when annual income is used this outcome is often taken to lessen the relevance of equity concerns regarding carbon pricing almost twenty five years after poterba 1991a piketty 2014 revived the idea that wealth is a dimension of economic welfare constituting an increasingly important source of inequality we show that omitting wealth in measuring ability to pay means underestimating the regressivity of carbon pricing and its inequity towards younger people using household level data and statistical matching we revisit poterba s application and compare the distributional incidence of the us gasoline tax for different measures of ability to pay total expenditure income and wealth adjusted income regressivity is not a reason to forgo carbon pricing as a cost effective approach to climate mitigation but calls for consideration and compensation of the distributional effects

the implications for households of environmental tax reform etr in europe abstract the paper discusses the distributional implications of environmental tax reform etr for households and presents new results from modelling the impacts of a major etr for the european union the distributional effects arise from the new environmental taxes any tax reductions made as part of the etr the wider macroeconomic impacts from the etr any special provisions in the etr and the environmental benefits from the etr the paper s literature review makes clear that while the impacts from taxes on the household use of energy are very often regressive transport taxes tend not to be although the impacts differ between urban and rural households moreover the net distributional impact is often less regressive or not at all once the wider distributional effects are taken into account residual regressive effects can in principle be removed by further adjustments in the tax or benefits system the modelling results suggest that an etr in europe will actually increase real incomes across the eu as a whole and will not be generally regressive although the results differ by country and for different socio economic groups the political acceptability of etr may depend on the worst effects on these groups being mitigated in some way

on price indices in the almost ideal demand system a number of papers have discussed the relationship between the almost ideal demand system aids and its linear approximation la aids in this paper it is shown that if the prices in the system are normalized to one the aids and la aids representations are identical at the point of normalization also at the point of normalization the expressions for price and expenditure elasticities from both systems are identical

a two stage rural household demand analysis microdata evidence from jiangsu province china in this paper we evaluate economic and demographic effects on china s rural household demand for nine food commodities vegetables pork beef and lamb poultry eggs fish sugar fruit and grain and five nonfood commodity groups clothing fuel stimulants housing and durables a two stage budgeting allocation procedure is used to obtain an empirically tractable amalgamative demand system for food commodities which combine an upper level aids model and a lower level gles as a modeling framework the results indicate that the slow growth of food consumption in china during the latter half of the 1980s is a result of income stagnation rather than consumption saturation growth in the demand for better food and shelter by chinese rural households will continue to be a major concern

nutrient consumption and household income in rural mexico we estimate the income elasticity for a variety of macro and micronutrients using a sample of poor rural households in mexico the nutrientincome elasticity is estimated using both parametric and semiparametric methods a special focus is placed on the nonlinearity of the relationship between nutrient intake and income and on measurement error and endogeneity issues one major finding is that income elasticity for calories is close to zero when we control for measurement error issues for some nutrients namely fats vitamin a and c calcium and heme iron we find a sizeable positive income elasticity robust to the choice of the estimator and percentiles at which it is evaluated these nutrients are also those for which we find the largest deficiency in our sample in addition we find that for the poorest households in our sample the deficiency of total energy protein and zinc is not accompanied by a positive income elasticity

household demand for fats and oils two step estimation of a censored demand system a censored system of household fat and oil demand equations is estimated with a two step procedure using cross sectional data from the 1987 1988 us nationwide food consumption survey own price and total expenditure elasticities are close to unity and there is no evidence of gross substitutability compensated elasticities suggest net substitution among the products considered

energy and climate hand in hand financing res e support with carbon revenues abstract in italy the cost of support for renewable electricity res e is largely recovered through the a3 surcharge which weighs heavily on electricity bills using household survey data we show the a3 surcharge is markedly regressive carbon taxation in the non ets sector is envisaged as a means to reduce co2 emissions cost effectively and generate revenue to lower the a3 surcharge a non ets carbon tax would be less regressive than the a3 surcharge and its cost would be more evenly distributed across households we calculate the revenue of a 20 tco2 non ets carbon tax would have allowed a cut in the a3 surcharge of about 68 in 2011 and 39 in 2012 the impact of the carbon tax plus the reduced a3 surcharge would have been less regressive but the cost higher for most households the restrictions imposed in the simulations mean the results are only appropriate to render first round effects of the reform policy relevance in the vast majority of the eu member states the cost of res e support is largely paid by electricity consumers most often through specific surcharges rising electricity prices are a common concern given the implications for competitiveness and equity the member states facing this issue could conveniently address it through environmental tax reforms consistent with the climate and energy package replacing res e surcharges with carbon taxes in the non ets sector would permit cost effective reduction of co2 emissions while allocating the cost of res e support more equitably the difference in regressivity would stem from the different consumption patterns of home fuels including electricity and motor fuels across income distribution a cross country comparison of energy household budget shares proves the structural nature of this difference between home fuels and motor fuels moreover the notion that electricity consumers should pay for res e support is questioned on the grounds that electricity is a basic necessity good and res e support is a means of providing public goods notably energy security and climate protection

distributional impacts of investment subsidies for residential energy technologies abstract this study analyses the distributional impacts of investment subsidies paid to households that install residential energy technologies based on renewable energy sources the subsidies covering a significant part of the total investment play a considerable role in households energy decisions depending on their design support measures may provide the most benefits to certain groups of society and thus may cause increasing inequality the potential distributional impacts of the investment subsidies are determined by the combination of technologies targeted and their costs household income support intensity subsidy design restrictions and the availability of additional measures this study examines the support system for residential renewable energy technologies in the lithuanian case by employing a microsimulation model this analysis of existing measures provides more general results and highlights the policy features that cause distributional impacts therefore the results are applicable in other countries as well the analysis shows that although the support is efficient from an energy point of view it provides the most benefits to households with higher income and thus increases inequality moreover the subsidies fail to reduce energy poverty due to the poorest households low capacity to invest to obtain a flatter distribution of benefits the design of support measures should consider the current situation of lower income households and affordability issues

the effect of price and income changes on food energy intake in sri lanka data is used to analyze the food acquisition behavior of households from a 1980 81 survey designed to be nationally sectorally and regionally representative of sri lanka the poor are shown to be much more responsive to price and income changes than other income groups the urban population generally exhibits lower income elasticities of demand for food commodities the poor appear to efficient substitutors thereby mitigating the effects of a price change on caloric intake the important exception is rice whose elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to price was about 4 times higher than for any other commodity the reluctance of households to substitute for rice even when faced with rising prices coupled with its large budget share show rice to be the most important consumption good higher rice prices are an important determinant of poverty for landless and urban workers moderating food prices preferably through technological change is a key ingredient to raising consumption among the poor simulations show that even if there are rapid and proportional increases in expenditures of all income groups this will not dramatically increase caloric intake among the poor however if the absolute value of the increase in real expenditures were distributed equally to all households there would be a marked increase in the of households consuming an adequate diet

economics of biofortification micronutrient malnutrition affects billions of people world wide causing serious health problems different micronutrient interventions are currently being used but their overall coverage is relatively limited biofortification that is breeding staple food crops for higher micronutrient contents has been proposed as a new agriculture based approach yet as biofortified crops are still under development relatively little is known about their economic impacts and wider ramifications in this article the main factors that will influence their future success are discussed and a methodology for economic impact assessment is presented combining agricultural nutrition and health aspects ex ante studies from india and other developing countries suggest that biofortified crops can reduce the problem of micronutrient malnutrition in a cost effective way when they are targeted to specific situations projected social returns on research investments are high and competitive with productivity enhancing agricultural technologies these promising results notwithstanding biofortification should be seen as a complement rather than a substitute for existing micronutrient interventions since the magnitude and complexity of the problem necessitate a multiplicity of approaches further research is needed to corroborate these findings and to address certain issues still unresolved at this stage

u turns and full circles two decades of agricultural reform in malawi 1981 2000 abstract this paper traces the evolution of malawi s agricultural policy over the past two decades during this period the world bank has played a key role in shaping policy reform through its adjustment loans three distinct reform phases can be identified 1981 87 when policy was dominated by the dogmatism of the world bank s pricist and state minimalist policies 1988 94 when a more flexible position was taken by both the bank and the malawi government both of whom acknowledged the structuralist critique of earlier policies and 1994 to the present when the reform process in agriculture became more politicized and a schism developed between the bank and the government this latter period is used to illustrate some of the unresolved policy issues pertaining to similar low income agrarian economies

a method for allocating renewable energy source subsidies among final energy consumers abstract in a new context of growing need for renewable energy sources res tariff design has become a critical component of energy system regulation a methodology for allocating the cost of res subsidies that ensures an optimal balance between compliance with the main regulatory principles of tariff design and each state s specific policy is of cardinal importance in the current context this paper presents and discusses a novel methodology to allocate the res subsidy costs which consists of distributing them among final energy consumers in proportion to their consumption regardless of the type of final energy consumed liquid fuels gas electricity or coal first the different designs of res subsidies are categorized and a review of a good number of the res burden sharing mechanisms implemented in the eu is presented then the proposed methodology is developed on the basis of the basic regulatory principles underlying the tariff design and the current regulatory context in force in the eu finally to illustrate its actual impact in a real case example the proposed methodology is applied to the spanish system in which the burden of extra costs incurred for res amounts to a very large proportion of the overall energy system costs

joint determination of food consumption and production in rural sierra leone estimates of a household firm model abstract this paper investigates the determination of food consumption for rural households in sierra leone that produce the foods which they consume a household firm model is estimated with seven commodities including five foods non foods and labor as compared to three commodities in past studies such food disaggregation permits tracing of the effects of socioeconomic variables on household nutrient availability household specialization in production is such that censored data is a problem a tobit approach is used to correct for this for most crops the own price effects on consumption remain negative when a price change is allowed to shift the budget constraint by effecting the profits from home production elasticities of calorie availability with respect to toal expenditure are found to be sizeable varying little by expenditure group the price elasticities of calorie availability are generally positive however an important exception occurs for price of the staple food rice this exception has several important policy implications which are explored

the real time price elasticity of electricity the real time price elasticity of electricity contains important information on the demand response of consumers to the volatility of peak prices despite the importance empirical estimates of the real time elasticity are hardly available this paper provides a quantification of the real time relationship between total peak demand and spot market prices we find a low value for the real time price elasticity which may partly be explained from the fact that not all users observe the spot market price if we correct for this phenomenon we find the elasticity to be fairly low for consumers currently active in the spot market if this conclusion applies to all users this would imply a limited scope for government intervention in supply security issues

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

how serious is the neglect of intrahousehold inequality in this report the authors develop a framework for assessing the consequences of ignoring intrahousehold inequality in the measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality they apply this framework to data for the philippines and conclude that 1 the result of neglecting intrahousehold inequality will probably be considerable understatement of the levels of poverty and inequality with the philippine data measured levels of inequality and poverty were off 30 percent as a result of ignoring intrahousehold variation and 2 patterns of inequality revealed by household level data are somewhat different from patterns revealed by individual level data but the differences seem not to be dramatic to confirm these results the exercise should be repeated with data from other countries

impacts of supermarkets on farm household nutrition in kenya summary many developing countries experience a food system transformation with a rapid growth of supermarkets we analyze impacts of supermarkets on farm household nutrition with survey data from kenya participation in supermarket channels is associated with significantly higher calorie vitamin a iron and zinc consumption we use simultaneous equation models to analyze impact pathways supermarket supplying households have higher incomes a higher share of land under vegetables and a higher likelihood of male control of revenues furthermore income and the share of land under vegetables have positive impacts while male control of revenues has negative impacts on dietary quality policy and further research implications are discussed

will developing country nutrition improve with income a case study for rural south india aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility implying income expenditure elasticities close to one however the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated estimates for a rural south indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero

the demand for dairy products structure prediction and decomposition this article presents an analysis of the demand for dairy products first the structure of dairy product demand is estimated using the household food consumption survey data under the assumption of a two stage budgeting procedure a complete demand system for food incorporating demographic effects is estimated next using the demand relations estimated from cross section data prediction interval tests utilizing time series data are performed for milk and butter last factors affecting consumption are classified into economic and demographic effects and a decomposition of the causes of changes in demand over time is performed

history and social responses to environmental tax reform in the united kingdom abstract this paper gives a short history of fuel taxation and the climate change levy in the uk the research described was based around the use of interviews and focus groups to inform the assessment of social responses to etr policies and the development of improved designs for them interviews were conducted with selected policy makers and companies focus groups were conducted with quota samples of the general public the research shows that the problem that etr faces in terms of public acceptance is not so much outright hostility to environmental taxation as conceptual problems with the design similar conceptual problems were also found in the interviews with business people these can be summarised as lack of trust about use of the revenues difficulty in understanding the purpose of a tax shift and a desire for incentives for good behaviour as well as perceived penalties for bad behaviour

the effect of counter trading on competition in electricity markets in a competitive electricity market nodal pricing is the most efficient way to manage congestion counter trading is inefficient as it gives the wrong long term signals for entry and exit of power plants however in a non competitive market additional entry will improve the competitiveness of the market and will increase social benefit by reducing price cost margins this paper studies whether the potential pro competitive entry effects could make counter trading more efficient than nodal pricing we find that this is unlikely to be the case and expect counter trading to have a negative effect on overall welfare the potential benefits of additional competition more competitive prices and lower production cost do not outweigh the distortions additional investment cost for the entrant and socialization of the congestion cost to final consumers

nutrient elasticities in a complete food demand system this study explores the linkage of the determinants of food choice with consumer nutrient availability by developing a procedure to measure changes in nutrient availability as the demand for food items change it uses demand elasticities from traditional demand analysis to estimate elasticities of changes in the nutritional content of consumer diets the procedure is applied to estimate nutrient elasticities for fifteen nutrients in response to changes in thirty five food prices and per capita income

human development in poor countries on the role of private incomes and public services development is often taken to mean rising incomes discussions of the goals of development now often emphasize the reduction of poverty rather than raising average incomes per se the role of social services particularly basic health and education has also received greater emphasis in the 1980s viewed mainly as instruments for raising the incomes of the poor but in all these approaches income growth of one sort or another is what development is all about a rather different view of the meaning of development has recently found expression in the 1990 human development report hrd produced by the united nations development programme a conceptual underpinning for this approach can be found in the work of amartya sen the essence of this view is that human development what people can actually do and be is the overriding purpose of economic development underdevelopment is viewed as the lack of certain basic capabilities rather than lack of income per se we do not aim here to advocate one of these approaches over the other but rather to explore their implications for development policy for instance what does the human development approach imply about the role of economic growth and in particular about reducing income poverty should development priorities shift toward the provision of public services in poor countries even if such a shift is at the expense of income growth

analysis of food demand in vietnam and short term impacts of market shocks on quantity and calorie consumption a complete demand system for vietnam was estimated using household survey data results showed that demand for rice with respect to prices and expenditure is relatively inelastic compared to other foods demand for food in general tends to be less elastic at higher levels of income and for urban households in the short term a market shock such as a 10 decrease in income or a 30 increase in rice prices forces households to spend a larger portion of their expenditure on rice at the expense of other foods low income households face a higher risk of undernourishment as their daily calorie intake is more negatively affected by the shocks than high income households the results suggest the importance of policies that provide necessary safety net programs for the poor

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

the distributional implications of a carbon tax in ireland we study the effects of carbon tax and revenue recycling across the income distribution in the republic of ireland in absolute terms a carbon tax of 20 tco2 would cost the poorest households less than 3 week and the richest households more than 4 week a carbon tax is regressive therefore however if the tax revenue is used to increase social benefits and tax credits households across the income distribution can be made better off without exhausting the total carbon tax revenue

pollution tax heuristics an empirical study of willingness to pay higher gasoline taxes economists widely agree that in concept pollution taxes are the most cost effective means of reducing pollution with the advent of monitoring and enforcement technologies the case for pollution taxation is generally getting stronger on the merits despite widespread agreement among economists however pollution taxes remain unpopular especially in north america some oppose pollution taxes because of a suspicion that government would misspend the tax proceeds while others oppose pollution taxes because they would impose economic hardships upon certain individuals groups or industries and there is no pollution tax more pathologically hated as the gasoline tax this is unfortunate from an economic perspective as a gasoline tax is easy to implement and is a reasonable pigouvian tax scaling proportionately with the harms of consumption surprisingly there is a dearth of theory explaining this cleave between economists and virtually everybody else drawing on behavioralist literatures this paper introduces several theories as to why people and governments so vehemently oppose pollution taxes using the example of gasoline taxes we provide some empirical evidence for these theories we also show that revenue recycling the use of tax proceeds to reduce other taxes is an effective means of reducing opposition to gasoline taxes

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

does it matter how we survey demand for food evidence from kenya and the philippines abstract this article examines the reliability of food quantity information collected from expenditure surveys and finds that measurement errors will very often be systematically correlated with income such that the response of food intakes to increases in income is seriously overstated this may be firstly because food quantities are not measured independently of income if total expenditures are the proxy used for income and secondly because food transfers in the form of guest and hired worker meals are under recorded these biases are illustrated using household surveys from kenya and the philippines

uncertain bidding zone configurations the role of expectations for transmission and generation capacity expansion abstract ongoing policy discussions on the reconfiguration of bidding zones in european electricity markets induce uncertainty about the future market design this paper deals with the question of how this uncertainty affects market participants and their long run investment decisions in generation and transmission capacity generalizing the literature on pro active network expansion planning we propose a stochastic multilevel model which incorporates generation capacity investment network expansion and market operation taking into account uncertainty about the future bidding zone configuration using a stylized two node network we disentangle different effects that uncertainty has on market outcomes if there is a possibility that future bidding zone configurations provide improved regional price signals welfare gains materialize even if the change does not actually take place as a consequence welfare gains of an actual change of the bidding zone configuration are substantially lower due to those anticipatory effects additionally we show substantial distributional effects in terms of both expected gains and risks between producers and consumers and between different generation technologies

congestion management through topological corrections a case study of central western europe the integration of an increasing amount of renewable generation within europe is posing operational challenges that require various balancing actions system operators therefore need to rely increasingly on the active control of the transmission network transmission topology control is a fast and economical option to add flexibility to the transmission system we model the current methodology for controlling congestion in the central western european cwe market and quantify the benefits of topology control we also compare the results with a nodal pricing model our computational results suggest that topology control can significantly reduce congestion management costs under the current market coupling regime whereas the benefits of topology control are limited under nodal pricing topology control emerges as an attractive and implementable means of managing congestion as it provides a significant percentage of the cost savings that would be achieved by overhauling the existing european market design and shifting to a nodal pricing regime

do you not like pigou or do you not understand him tax aversion and revenue recycling in the lab tax aversion reduces the likelihood that price rationing can be a politically viable tool for environmental protection we examine the case of the classic pigouvian tax to control a negative externality and consider how recycling the revenues labeling of the tax and information about its purpose affects the support for taxation we test the support for taxation within a single price market experiment in which purchases by some buyers impose external costs on others observing behavior consistent with tax aversion we also find that recycling the revenues to more narrowly targeted groups seems to increase support for taxation in the absence of narrow revenue recycling labeling a pigouvian instrument as a tax may significantly lower the likelihood of voter support

analyzing nutritional impacts of price and income related shocks in malawi simulating household entitlements to food the 2007 2008 food price crisis and the following global economic recession has temporarily increased the number of people to suffer from hunger while the impacts can be measured with precision only ex post for policy makers it is critical to get a sense of likely impacts ex ante in order to plan approaches to mitigate these impacts in this paper we adopt a very simple micro based simulation approach to analyze how changes in prices of specific food groups such as maize prices or prices for staple foods as well as how negative short term household level income shocks affect the entitlements to calorie consumption of individuals and how these changes affect overall food poverty we illustrate our approach using household survey data from malawi we find that food poverty is of serious concern with large within country variations we find that price shocks for staple foods have a considerable impact on food security with particularly strong effects on poor net food buyers in rural and urban areas this paper demonstrates that it is possible to estimate food security impacts of price and income shocks ex ante in a relatively straightforward fashion that can be done relatively quickly and that is suitable for cross country assessments of the likely impacts of shocks on food security and the design of appropriate response measures

the welfare effects and the distributive impact of carbon taxation on italian households in this work the welfare effects and the distributive impact on italian households of the italian carbon tax are calculated the carbon tax has been introduced in italy at the beginning of 1999 asking for smooth increases over a number of years in the prices of most fossil fuels its welfare effects have been calculated using true cost of living index numbers and the compensating variation the parameters have been obtained through estimation of a complete almost ideal demand system using households data from 1985 to 1996 the welfare loss turns out to be quite substantial and affects italian households in a non negligible way but the distribution of welfare losses across different levels of total monthly expenditures does not allow sustaining the regressivity of carbon taxation as the effect becomes bigger as we move up the income distribution this evidence might encourage the use of carbon taxes at least in the transport sector as cost effective instruments of environmental policy especially after the ratification of the kyoto protocol on climate change

toward a food secure future ensuring food security for sustainable human development in sub saharan africa food security remains a top development priority and global concern it is enshrined in the 2030 agenda for sustainable development in sustainable development goal two food security is also a core component of the human development and capability paradigm since food access and entitlements are critical for reinforcing essential human capabilities in introducing this special issue this paper argues that agriculture is central to improving food security and reducing poverty in africa it suggests that realizing the potential of agriculture in africa requires rapid increases in land productivity and increases in agricultural yields a science based approach that integrates gender and sustainability is critical to meet this goal through the design and implementation of policies that improve the availability farm inputs and farm technology the paper concludes by introducing the papers in this special issue

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

economic crisis and the unemployment effect on household food expenditure the case of spain this paper examines the unemployment effect on food expenditure uefe for spanish households and quantifies its magnitude in boom and crisis periods the results show that the uefe was negative in both contexts but was reinforced during the economic crisis applying propensity score matching and difference in differences techniques to a sample of spanish households for 2006 and 2013 representative of a boom period and a crisis period respectively we found that the uefe amounted to 2 9 in the boom period and to 4 5 in the crisis period quantile difference in differences estimates confirmed that the economic crisis enhanced the uefe for spanish households with this effect decreasing continuously up to quantile 0 9 the uefe was exacerbated mainly in those economically disadvantaged households

more evidence on nutrition demand income seems overrated and women s schooling underemphasized abstract malnutrition is widespread in the developing world controversy continues concerning the roles of income household size and women s schooling on nutrient demand empirical estimates for nicaragua suggest that income elasticities are small and inversely associated with income levels there are some economies of scale in household size the elasticity for women s schooling is higher than those for income or household size and women s backgrounds are important the results cast doubt on the strong emphasis the world bank and others have placed on income and suggest that schooling may be working through tastes not only through productivity

intergenerational persistence in health in developing countries the penalty of gender inequality this paper is motivated to investigate the often neglected payoff to investments in the health of girls and women in terms of next generation outcomes this paper investigates the intergenerational persistence of health across time and region as well as across the distribution of maternal health it uses comparable microdata on as many as 2 24 million children born of about 0 6 million mothers in 38 developing countries in the 31 year period 1970 2000 mother s health is indicated by her height bmi and anemia status child health is indicated by mortality risk and anthropometric failure we find a positive relationship between maternal and child health across indicators and highlight non linearities in these relationships the results suggest that both contemporary and childhood health of the mother matter and that the benefits to the next generation are likely to be persistent averaging across the sample persistence shows a considerable decline over time disaggregation shows that the decline is only significant in latin america persistence has remained largely constant in asia and has risen in africa the paper provides the first cross country estimates of the intergenerational persistence in health and the first estimates of trends

the merit order effect of wind and photovoltaic electricity generation in germany 2008 2016 estimation and distributional implications abstract generation from renewable energy sources in germany has experienced a considerable uptake in recent years mainly responsible for this development is the german renewable energy sources act erneuerbare energien gesetz eeg this paper considers redistributive implications of the eeg for different electricity consumers using time series regression analysis we show that electricity generation by wind and pv has reduced spot market prices considerably by 6 mwh in 2010 rising to 10 mwh in 2012 we use these results to build a near term forecasting tool for merit order effects projected to reach 14 16 mwh in 2016 on the other hand the costs of the eeg are passed forward to consumers in the form of a surcharge our findings highlight significant redistributive transfers under the current design of the eeg in particular some energy intensive industries are benefiting from lower wholesale electricity prices whilst being largely exempted from contributing to the costs of the scheme we also highlight implications of our results for other areas for reform of the eeg such as adequate remuneration mechanisms that ensure efficient operation and investment decisions are made under the scheme more generally these findings suggest that policy makers need to integrate distributional assessments into policy design and implementation