responding to food insecurity employing the market information and food insecurity response analysis framework in rural northern kenya abstract aid agencies are increasingly advocating for cash transfers as a substitute or complement to food transfers when responding to both emergency and chronic food insecurity yet cash is not always optimal in this article we demonstrate how a newly developed response analysis tool the marketing information and food insecurity response analysis mifira framework can guide evidence based identification of appropriate transfers we present findings from a mifira analysis in marsabit a remote and generally food insecure district of northern kenya as a demonstration of the analytical versatility of mifira we utilise a variety of data ranging from rigorously collected household data to market surveys and rapid assessments in focus groups as a proof of concept this article shows how mifira can be effectively deployed in other regions facing chronic or emergency food insecurity to help response agencies make systematic decisions on a solid evidence base

world poverty and the role of agricultural technology direct and indirect effects agricultural technology can help reduce poverty through direct and indirect effects direct effects are gains for the adopters while indirect effects are gains derived from adoption by others leading to lower food prices employment creation and growth linkage effects conceptualising and measuring these effects is highly complex yet is needed for each region if technology is to be used as an effective instrument for poverty reduction we propose a methodology for doing this in the context of computable general equilibrium modelling and apply it to archetype models for africa asia and latin america results show that the dominant effect of technology on poverty is through direct effects in africa indirect agricultural employment effects in asia and linkage effects through the rest of the economy in latin america in each case increasing the poverty reduction effect through the targeting of technology across crops and through complementary rural development programmes is also explored

a comment on why did child support award levels decline from 1978 to 1985 by philip k robins between 1978 and 1985 the mean real value of child support payments due declined 25 percent in this journal philip robins argued most of this decline was the result of an increase in the ratio of female to male earnings but we argue his conclusion is based upon an inappropriate use of decomposition analysis we show child support due declined largely as a result of a secular decline in the real value of new awards which have fallen almost three percent per year since 1961 and we investigate why new awards declined our findings have implications for reforms contained in the family support act of 1988

do big countries win tariff wars yes it is widely believed that tariffs invite retaliation and that the postretaliation equilibrium l eaves all countries worse off than they would be at free trade the a uthors present a simple pure exchange model with two countries and t wo goods and show which endowment patterns are consistent with this belief they find that if one country is substantially bigger than th e other it can expect to gain from a tariff war despite retaliation the model can be extended to show that the advantage obtained by bei ng part of a large trading unit can help explain the formation of cus toms unions copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

ethiopia food for work or food for relief abstract this article examines the aims context and experience of food aid projects in ethiopia the major focus is a case study of an ethiopian food for work project the largest in sub saharan africa and favourable conclusions are drawn factors are identified which have made for this apparent success since one factor is local food shortage consideration is also given to the proposition that the concept of relief aid needs a wider definition than heretofore

rural public works and food for work a survey abstract there are three separate strands to the debate on food for work first issues concerning labor intensive public works more generally in particular the tension between short run employment creation income generation and the size and distribution of the longer term income stream second how useful is food as a wage good in rural works overall generalizations as to the superiority of cash as against wages in kind are not sustainable third is food aid an appropriate resource to support rural works the relative success over the past decade of major schemes in south asia with food widely used as wage good justifies a reassessment of the potential of rural works both as food security mechanism and in expanding employment of disadvantaged groups in a situation of widespread structural underemployment less satisfactory longer term income distributional and asset generating impact of such schemes must remain a serious source of concern the impact of food aid to rural works appears more problematic in sub saharan africa scope exists for more flexible and innovative use of this resource

do fiscal rules dampen the political business cycle this paper develops and tests the theory that fiscal rules limit politicians ability to manipulate the budget for electoral gain using panel data from the american states i find evidence suggesting that stringent balanced budget rules dampen the political business cycle that is while spending rises before and falls after elections in states that can carry deficits into the next fiscal year this pattern does not exist in states with strict no carry rules neither binding gubernatorial term limits nor the partisan composition of government appear to significantly affect the magnitude of the political business cycle

food aid food prices and producer disincentives in ethiopia although the short term aims of food aid are well conceived strong concerns have been voiced regarding the long term impacts of such aid on incentives for agricultural producers in recipient countries this article examines the statistical link between food aid shipments and food prices in ethiopia over the period 1996 2006 monthly data from three markets and three commodities are used to estimate a system of seemingly unrelated regression models for food prices results indicate that previous year food aid shipments reduce prices in all producer and consumer markets these effects however appear to be limited to the set of internationally traded commodities that are domestically marketed a recursive regression procedure is used to identify the food aid threshold at which a negative aid effect emerges food aid shipments that constitute less than 10 of domestic production appear to be benign but shipments above this level show signs of being disruptive to local markets we use a simple policy simulation to argue that production sensitive targeting e g conditioning food aid on local food production would help to circumvent disincentive effects copyright 2009 oxford university press

food aid pitfalls and potential abstract in this article the author asks if it is possible to use food aid so that it meets short run needs while supporting and not undermining the achievement of long term goals of self reliance at household and national level the pitfalls and possibilities to elucidate methods of achieving this are explored after looking at the specific effects on nutrition and incentives to local agriculture it is concluded that most objectives are better achieved by the use of cash rather than food aid

who gets the goods a general equilibrium perspective on food aid in mozambique abstract we employ a computable general equilibrium approach to examine the effects of alternative food aid distribution schemes for drought response food aid to mozambique alternative schemes have very distinct impacts on household welfare and prices compared with monetization of food aid by government direct distribution to households by population shares strongly benefits rural households even assuming that government cannot target food aid strictly at drought stricken rural people our results indicate that when improving household welfare is the primary goal of the food aid direct distribution of food aid to households is preferred

transfers in cash and in kind theory meets the data we review theoretical explanations for in kind transfers in light of the limited empirical evidence after reviewing the traditional paternalistic arguments we consider explanations based on imperfect information and self targeting we then discuss the large literature on in kind programs as a way of improving the efficiency of the tax system and a range of other possible explanations including the samaritan s dilemma pecuniary effects credit constraints asymmetric information amongst agents and political economy considerations our reading of the evidence suggests that paternalism and interdependent preferences are leading overall explanations for the existence of in kind transfer programs but that some of the other arguments may apply to specific cases political economy considerations must also be part of the story

government spending and budget deficits in the industrial economies fiscal policy nouriel roubini and jeffrey sachs this paper examines the evolution of the size of government and of budget deficits in oecd economies we highlight the rapid increase in government spending in the 1970s the sharp rise in budget deficits and public debt after 1973 and the reversal in these trends in the 1980s the increase in the size of government was associated in part with the slowdown in growth after 1973 but also reflected gradual adjustment of the ratio of spending to output towards a long run target which depends on political and institutional characteristics of the economy the political orientation of the government the degree of wage indexation and the degree of stability of the political system such factors also explain the size of budget deficits when faced with an adverse shock subsequent deficit reduction requires a measure of political consensus we note that such consensus is hard to achieve in multi party coalitions in consequence countries with such a political structure tended in consequence countries with such a political structure tended toin consequence countries with such a political structure tended to experience much more rapid increases in their debt gnp ratios

the nash bargaining solution is optimal abstract we consider the problem faced by players in a two person bargaining game who have different opinions about what is the appropriate solution concept to use a procedure is proposed to resolve such a conflict and it is shown that the nash bargaining solution constitutes the unique equilibrium of the game induced by the procedure as a by product we obtain that in the axiomatic characterization of the nash solution the controversial independence of irrelevant alternatives axiom can be replaced by a much weaker recursivity axiom which amounts to requiring independence of alternatives that cannot be obtained as an outcome of a risk sensitive solution

the economics of food aid under subsistence farming with an application to malawi abstract we investigate how food aid affects price and production of staple food with a partial equilibrium model with non separable production and consumption the model captures the key characteristics of sub saharan africa subsistence economies simulations generate negative but also positive food aid elasticities of production conditions are identified which mitigate the negative impact and support a positive impact the share of domestic food production in total staple food demand and the share of income from staple food production in total household income are key determinants price and production equations estimated with a panel of district data of the malawi maize market for the period 1999 2010 show a small positive impact of food aid large negative impacts of food aid are not likely given production and income shares and behavioural responses

pecuniary redistribution through in kind programs abstract the pecuniary effects of cash and in kind programs differ a program that builds housing for the poor for example is likely to result in a lower price of existing low income housing than would an equally costly cash transfer program low income renters in general would benefit landlords would lose this paper argues that these pecuniary effects provide a previously unstudied rationale for the use of in kind programs specifically in a world in which the government has limited ability to target taxation the pecuniary effects of in kind programs may be used to transfer rents from one group in society to another the pros and cons of using in kind programs in this way are identified and examples from the real world are discussed

the price effects of cash versus in kind transfers this article examines the effect of cash versus in kind transfers on local prices both types of transfers increase the demand for normal goods in kind transfers also increase supply in recipient communities which could lead to lower prices than under cash transfers we test and confirm this prediction using a programme in mexico that randomly assigned villages to receive boxes of food trucked into the village equivalently valued cash transfers or no transfers we find that prices are significantly lower under in kind transfers compared to cash transfers relative to the control group in kind transfers cause a 4 fall in prices while cash transfers cause a positive but negligible increase in prices in the more economically developed villages in the sample households purchasing power is only modestly affected by these price effects in the less developed villages the price effects are much larger in magnitude which we show is due to these villages being less tied to the outside economy and having less competition among local suppliers

can food for work encourage agricultural production abstract food for work ffw is the most widely used type of public works program in ethiopia through which a high share of the food aid is distributed this paper assesses the impacts of ffw in tigray a chronically food insecure region in ethiopia in terms of relieving liquidity constraints and thereby improving input use in agriculture a heckman selection model on the adoption and intensity of fertilizer use demonstrated that ffw positively influenced the decision to adopt fertilizer and there was no evidence of disincentive effect

government strength power dispersion in governments and budget deficits in oecd countries a voting power approach we test for the influenceof government strength and dispersion ofpower among the parties of coalitiongovernments on the size of annual debtaccumulation through budget deficits inoecd countries from 1970 to 1999 government strength and power dispersion incoalition governments are measured by thebanzhaf index of voting power respectivelythe standard deviation of banzhaf indicesof coalition parties we believe that theseare better suited proxies than most of whathas been applied so far governmentstrength turns out to be insignificant however coalitions with equally strongpartners run significantly higher deficitsthan coalitions with one dominating party

the monetization of project and emergency food aid project level efficiency first abstract the level of food aid monetization has increased sharply particularly in africa and especially to cover the transport and non food costs of food aid projects monetization to raise cash is not wrong in principle and increases the efficiency of cash starved projects however the focus on generating counterpart funds has obscured a more important debate about whether and when food is more appropriate than cash at the project level there can be no general predisposition to use either food or cash but guidelines must be applied in each case

fiscal transparency political parties and debt in oecd countries abstract many believe and argue that fiscal or budgetary transparency has large positive effects on fiscal performance however the evidence linking transparency and fiscal policy outcomes is less compelling to analyze the effects of fiscal transparency on public debt accumulation we present a career concerns model with political parties this allows us to integrate as implications of a single model three hitherto separate results in the literature on deficit and debt accumulation that transparency decreases debt accumulation at least by reducing an electoral cycle in deficits that right wing governments at least for strategic reasons tend to have higher deficits than left wing governments and that increasing political polarization increases debt accumulation to test the predictions of the model we construct a replicable index of fiscal transparency on 19 country oecd data simultaneous estimates of debt and transparency strongly confirm that a higher degree of fiscal transparency is associated with lower public debt and deficits independent of controls for explanatory variables from other approaches

food aid impacts in rural kenya assessing the potential role of food aid in economic development requires that analytical attention be given to both household production and consumption consequences of food aid projects effects of a food for work ffw project in rural kenya are assessed using a peasant household firm model which incorporates a linear programming model and an almost ideal demand system the results indicate that program participants have net returns 52 percent higher than nonparticipants most of which is due to induced effects of capital formation on own farm production greater capital formation increases the opportunity cost of participants time encouraging a transition over time from ffw activities to greater own farm production ffw increases food demand employment and marketable surplus

does nutrition sensitive aid reduce the prevalence of undernourishment abstract this paper examines the impacts of nutrition sensitive sector aid inflows on the prevalence of undernourishment we find nutrition sensitive aid can reduce undernourishment estimates suggest that a 10 increase in overall nutrition sensitive aid would approximately decrease hunger by 1 1 2 years later on average among nutrition sensitive aid inflows we find that emergency food aid reduces hunger a year later and that food aid is more effective than emergency food aid at reducing medium term hunger a 10 increase in food aid per capita would result in a 1 3 decrease in hunger 3 years later on average against 1 for a similar increase in emergency food aid per capita generally the size of the aid effects on hunger depend on the time horizon considered in the empirical analysis our findings provide supporting evidence for the prioritization of specific nutrition sensitive investments within the sdg agenda while simultaneously challenging the relative reallocation of nutrition sensitive aid that has reduced the role of food and emergency food aid inflows

does food aid have disincentive effects on local production a general equilibrium perspective on food aid in ethiopia this paper examined impacts of food aid on domestic food production employing a computable general equilibrium modelling technique and using data from ethiopia the simulation experiments have shown that food aid has unambiguous disincentive effects on domestic food production the removal of food aid caused a modest increase in food prices but this stimulated food production employment and income generation effects of the latter outweighed the adverse effect of the former consequently the removal of food aid led to improvements in aggregate household welfare contrary to some concerns in the food aid literature that any reduction in food aid would hurt the poor the simulation experiments suggested that actually poor rural households and urban wage earners are the ones who benefit most in absence of food aid but entrepreneurs are more likely to encounter a marginal welfare decline we have distinguished between in kind food aid and cash equivalent transfers in order to isolate the disincentives that in kind transfers would make to domestic production from those that are related to household purchasing power problem the expansionary effect of removing food aid becomes significantly larger when it is accompanied by cash equivalent payments because the latter would provide demand side stimulus to agriculture while the removal of in kind transfers would stimulate supply side with the supply and demand side effects reinforcing each other in our modelling framework the only adverse effect would be a modest deterioration in the external current account because the expansionary effects of food aid would cause imports to rise but exports to fall

managerial incentive problems a dynamic perspective the paper studies how a person s concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job in the model the person s productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance there are no explicit output contingent contracts but since the wage in each period is based on expected output and expected output depends on assessed ability an implicit contract links today s performance to future wages an incentive problem arises from the person s ability and desire to influence the learning process and therefore the wage process by taking unobserved actions that affect today s performance the fundamental incongruity in preferences is between the individual s concern for human capital returns and the firm s concern for financial returns the two need be only weakly related it is shown that career motives can be beneficial as well as detrimental depending on how well the two kinds of capital returns are aligned it is well understood by now that informational externalities may place special demands on the organization of economic exchange simple price mediated markets will frequently fail in the presence of asymmetric information in that case more elaborate contractual arrangements have to be used as substitutes for the price system lately considerable effort has been devoted to the analysis of contracting under incomplete information with the objective to understand the range of economic institutions that emerge in response to the failure of the price system the analysis of moral hazard has played a prominent role in this development moral hazard problems arise when for some reason or another transacting parties cannot contract contingent on the delivery of the good for instance in buying labour services it may be that the amount of labour supplied is not directly observable precluding a simple exchange of wage for labour as a partial remedy to this problem an imperfect mutually observed signal about the supply of labour can be used as a proxy in the contract frequently output is taken as such a proxy the drawback is that output is often influenced by other factors than labour input which induce undesirable risk into the contract one is therefore faced with a tradeoff between allocating risk associated with incomplete observability and providing incentives for a proper supply of labour gaining insight into this tradeoff is important not only for understanding contracting in the small e g managerial incentive schemes but also because it is closely related to the fundamental tension between equity and efficiency in the society as a whole while our understanding of moral hazard has advanced a lot in past years it is clear that much work remains an important question that has received little attention until

agricultural trade negotiations as a strategic game abstract this study views multilateral trade negotiations as a strategic game among nations or regions including taxpayer consumer and producer components payoffs are calculated from an intermediate run international trade model initialized with 1989 data for the public at large the nash equilibrium and socially optimal outcome is liberalization of trade unilateral or multilateral maintenance of the status quo of market distortions costing the world billions of dollars each year is rational only if producer payoffs are sovereign so that strategies optimal for producers are considered optimal for nations remedial policies are discussed including opportunities for economic education political system reform and less incentives for producers to scuttle multilateral trade negotiations

do intra household effects generate the food stamp cash out puzzle previous empirical studies have noted the higher marginal propensity to consume food out of food stamps in the united states compared to that out of cash income analyzing data from u s food stamp program participants we find evidence that this discrepancy may be driven primarily by the behavior of multiple adult households single adult households show no evidence of any discrepancy thus our results suggest that food stamp and cash income welfare or market may have very different impact on the intra household allocation process and that this is reflected empirically in the cash out puzzle

trade wars trade negotiations and applied game theory what is the value of trade negotiations quantitative measures of the value of trade liberalisation generally ignore the strategic aspects of protection policy the traditional approach is to compare welfare levels under the existing structure of protection with welfare levels under some alternative structure of protection such as unilateral or multilateral free trade we add two additional questions first in a non cooperative context are either of these points of comparison consistent with countries adopting best response policies given the policies of other countries second in the context of a cooperative negotiation are either of these points of comparison consistent with the outcome that meets certain plausible criteria for a bargaining process if the answer to either of these questions is no then the traditional approach provides at best an incomplete answer to the original question and could provide a misleading answer a simple example illustrates our basic point consider the game in table i this is a non cooperative game between the united states and ec in which each agent has just two pure strategies to do nothing and keep k the existing structure of protection in place or to abolish a trade barriers on imports from the other agent only the payoffs shown are the annual welfare impact relative to the status quo as measured by the equivalent variation ev in income in billions of i973 u s dollars the values shown are taken from the simulation results of brown and whalley i980 table i 4 p 864 what is the best response of the united states in this context if the ec decides to keep its protection structure the united states does better by also keeping its protection structure intact in other words given that the ec plays k it is a best response for the united states to also play k thus the traditional approach would imply that the united states gains from protection in this case however what is the best response of the united states if the ec decides to abolish its protection structure in this instance the united states does best by also abolishing its protection structure the point here is simply that the welfare cost of protection to the united states depends on what the ec does without saying something about what the ec will do one cannot answer our question vis a vis the united states as it happens in this particular game we

separation of powers and political budget cycles political budget cycles pbcs arise when the electorate is imperfectly informed about the incumbent s competence and the incumbent has discretion over the budget focusing on the second condition we study how separation of powers affects pbcs in the composition of government spending we find that the details of the budget process namely the bargaining rules the status quo s location and the degree of compliance with the budget law are critical for the existence and the amplitudes of pbcs in particular when the status quo is determined by the previous budget and there is high compliance with the budget law separation of powers acts as a commitment device which solves the credibility problems that drive pbcs

large cash transfers to the elderly in south africa we examine the social pension in south africa where large cash sums about twice the median per capita income of african households are paid to people qualified by age but irrespective of previous contributions we present the history of the scheme and use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers documenting who receive the pensions their levels of living and those of their families we also look at behavioural effects particularly the effects of the cash receipts on the allocation of income to food schooling transfers and savings in south africa a large social pension about twice the median per capita income of african households is paid in cash to people qualified by age irrespective of previous contributions we present the history of the scheme and explain how such large transfers could come about in an economy in which the recipients were not only politically weak but without any political representation whatsoever we then use a 1993 nationally representative survey to investigate the redistributive consequences of the transfers documenting who receive the pensions their levels of living and those of their families we also look at behavioural effects particularly the effects of the cash receipts on the allocation of income to food schooling transfers and savings the pressing policy issue for south africans is whether it makes sense to target seven billion rand nearly 2 billion of social expenditure through the current pension schemes our analysis contributes to the discussion by documenting the redistributive and behavioural effects of the transfers we find that at least as far as immediate incidence is concerned and without allowance for behavioural effects the social pension is an effective tool of redistribution and that the households it reaches are predominantly poor because so many of the elderly among south africa s african population live with children the social pension is also effective in putting money into house

giving to the poor targeting of food aid in rural ethiopia abstract this study determines the factors underlying the allocations of food aid in ethiopia we focus on regional differences in targeting criteria and targeting accuracy according to per capita income data are drawn from two linked rural household surveys in 1995 96 we find large differences in food aid allocations across regions that cannot be explained by observable regional characteristics such as per capita income and rainfall these differences are consistent with speculation that food aid is being used by the ethiopian government to transfer resources to favored regions we also find wide variations in the criteria used to identify recipient households across regions we identify measurable indicators that could be used by food aid authorities to improve targeting effectiveness in the future both across and within regions finally we present simulation results on targeting accuracy under various targeting strategies and discuss potential benefits and shortcomings of those strategies

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

on the choice and impacts of innovative international food assistance instruments summary the rise of new food assistance instruments including local and regional procurement cash and vouchers has surpassed increase in understanding of the tradeoffs among and impacts of these options relative to traditional food aid response choices rarely appear to result from systematic response analyses further impacts along multiple dimensions timeliness cost effectiveness local market effects recipient satisfaction food quality impact on smallholder suppliers etc may be competing or synergistic no single food assistance tool is always and everywhere preferable a growing body of evidence including the papers in this special section nonetheless demonstrates the clear value added of new food assistance instruments

inducing risk neutral preferences with binary lotteries a reconsideration abstract we evaluate the binary lottery procedure for inducing risk neutral behavior we strip the experimental implementation down to bare bones taking care to avoid any potentially confounding assumptions about behavior having to be made in particular our evaluation does not rely on the assumed validity of any strategic equilibrium behavior or even the customary independence axiom we show that subjects sampled from our population are generally risk averse when lotteries are defined over monetary outcomes and that the binary lottery procedure does indeed induce a statistically significant shift toward risk neutrality this striking result generalizes to the case in which subjects make several lottery choices and one is selected for payment

political determinants of budget deficits coalition effects versus minority effects this paper reexamines some recent empirical evidence on the hypothesis that institutional arrangements in the political process affect budget deficits the results of roubini and sachs 1989b are replicated and sensitivity analysis indicate that their results are robust however the main conclusion of roubini and sachs that coalition governments are less capable of budgetary discipline needs to be modified a reformulation of their variable representing political cohesion reveals that it captures the effects of minority governments rather than majority coalition governments the data support the hypothesis that it is harder to negotiate in parliament than within a government

sri lanka can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study can conditional cash transfer cct programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks conducted the program started in 1997 and still exists today in sri lanka the study observed that income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk coping instruments are insufficient cct programs where the condition is on school attendance have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work shocks are highly prevalent and children have irregular periods of school enrollment children who are taken out of school are less likely to re enroll

us presidential elections and real gdp growth 1961 2004 in this paper i show that since 1960 an electoral cycle in us output growth can both be seen by the naked eye in the raw data and confirmed by a statistical analysis that allows for rational partisan effects as well as a wide range of control variables that is controlling for multiple lags of interest rate changes inflation money growth energy prices lagged output growth government spending or its growth and temporary partisan effects the timing of elections exerts a significant influence on quarterly real gdp growth

europe 1992 and the western pacific economies the main stimulus to completing the integration of the economies of the european community under the i992 programme has been the ec s relatively slow economic growth during the past two or three decades while japan s share of world gdp has trebled since the early i96os to about one sixth the eci 2 s share has fallen slightly to around one quarter many expect or at least hope that the removal of remaining barriers to movements of goods services people and capital within the ec not only will provide a one off boost to ec output cecchini et al i988 but will set ec incomes on a permanently higher growth path baldwin i989 numerous non europeans worry however that the trade diverting consequences of the ec reforms together with possible enlargements of ec membership and changes in ec preferential trading arrangements will be much more significant than any external trade creation and may make some excluded economies worse off this paper seeks to assess the effects of the ec92 programme and related changes currently underway in europe on the trade and growth prospects of a particularly vulnerable group namely the western pacific economies the next section of the paper explains why the western pacific region defined to include northeast and southeast asia plus australia and new zealand is a natural grouping of economies for considering external effects of european policy changes 2 the subsequent section summarizes the likely effects of those changes on the volume and commodity composition of europe s external trade and hence on the trade and welfare of different western pacific economies the fourth section examines possible responses by that region to these developments and their likely repercussions for europe the paper concludes that while the western pacific economies are likely to respond positively to whatever changes take place in europe welfare there in europe

impact of the 1996 us fair act on the common agricultural policy in the world trade organisation context the decoupling issue abstract the united states us federal agriculture improvement and reform fair act of 1996 represents a watershed not only from a domestic point of view but also from the perspective of the next round of international agricultural negotiations in particular it will force the european union eu to reform its agricultural policy so that compensatory payments for support price cuts are included in the green box or at least are much more decoupled than at present us exports of several agricultural products including maize pork and poultry meat barring a prolonged global economic downturn should increase substantially over the 7 year period of the act and beyond accordingly the us will certainly attempt to ensure that trade barriers with the eu and subsidised competition from the eu in third markets are kept to a minimum though the 1999 eu proposals for a new reform of the common agricultural policy cap represent a courageous step in the right direction they are likely to be insufficient to comply with future world trade organisation wto commitments in particular with regard to the decoupling of direct aid payments we have made a number of proposals for an internal support policy which explicitly recognises that european farmers have several functions that require specific forms of public intervention and which should comply with future wto requirements

disagreement points in trade negotiations abstract this paper analyzes trade negotiations between two large countries in the framework of an alternating offer bargaining model with endogenous interim disagreement actions despite of the flexibility in disagreement tariff selection the countries would keep the status quo tariffs in disagreement periods as far as the country which benefits from keeping the status quo tariffs compensates for the other country s foregone gains from deviating in disagreement actions each equilibrium outcome converges to a corresponding nash bargaining solution whose disagreement point reflects the status quo tariff rates as well as the threat of raising the tariff to the nash tariff rate

comparative politics and public finance we propose a model with micropolitical foundations to contrast different political regimes compared to a parliamentary regime the institutions of a presidential congressional regime produce fewer incentives for legislative cohesion but more separation of powers these differences are reflected in the size and composition of government spending a parliamentary regime has redistribution toward a majority less underprovision of public goods and more rents to politicians a presidential congressional regime has redistribution toward powerful minorities more underprovision of public goods but less rents to politicians the size of government is smaller under a presidential regime this last prediction is consistent with cross country data

introduction food policy food aid and economic adjustment abstract in this introduction to food policy s special issue the guest editors look at the various ways in which food policy food aid and economic adjustment can interact to mutual advantage as developing countries pursue economic adjustment strategies to compensate for the unprecedented world recession concern is being expressed about the condition of poor people in low income countries and the need for adjustment with a human face with increasing amounts of aid resources being used for adjustment programmes interest has grown that food aid should also be used more purposefully to support the adjustment process

the effects of trade liberalisation abstract the liberalisation of agricultural trade has been an important component of the uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations under the gatt a considerable amount of research effort has been expended on estimating the costs of agricultural protectionism most of this activity has been based on a partial equilibrium framework with conventional quantification of the distributive benefits and costs to be expected from liberalisation attempts at general equilibrium analysis have been fewer but provide evidence of the economy wide gains from the removal of protection whilst these analyses have had a powerful influence on the nature of the political discussions on agricultural trade policy they have not helped define the details of politically acceptable alternatives to current agricultural supports the reasons are the technical economic data and statistical problems which restrict the interpretation of results to broad generalisations and the failure of analyses to focus on the most important political concerns indicating these concerns may help define the focus of future research but it is doubted if conventional economic analysis has very much more to offer

a future food aid regime implications of final act of the uruguay round conclusion of the uruguay round the signing and ratification of the final act and the setting up of the world trade organisation wto provide a major opportunity for establishing a new food aid regime within a liberalising global economy the uruguay round will be only one of a number of factors affecting world food production trade prices and aid and the final act falls far short of the full liberalisation of trade originally envisaged other factors which were not addressed directly during the uruguay round negotiations including the emergence of regional trading blocks in europe north america and south east asia the underlying forces of technological change that will continue to increase food production and rising population growth and commercial demand in developing countries as incomes increase are likely to have significant effects on food supply demand and price relationships but will the uruguay round provide the swing factor with other forces more or less cancelling each other out page 1994 furthermore gains brought about by the uruguay round in the agricultural sector may be offset by losses in other sectors and vice versa islam and valdes 1990 nevertheless a major change has been brought about by the uruguay round in the way food markets are viewed in the rules under which countries must operate their national food policies and the opportunities for effective use of food aid

does food aid really have disincentive effects new evidence from sub saharan africa summary limited empirical evidence exists either to refute or confirm the pervasive belief that food aid has significant disincentive effects on recipient food production using household level data from rural ethiopia we demonstrate that while simple descriptive statistics appear consistent with the disincentive effects hypothesis once one controls properly for the endogeneity of food aid receipt no empirical support remains for the hypothesis that food aid creates disincentive effects among recipient households the macro economic evidence yields similar findings applying vector autoregression methods to national level data controlling for possible confounding variables we find that food aid has no disincentive effect on food production

enhancing nutrition a new tool for ex ante comparison of commodity based vouchers and food transfers summary this article presents a new analytical tool for ex ante comparison of the cost effectiveness of two transfer modalities in pursuing specific nutritional objectives it does so by introducing a metric to score the nutrient value of a food basket the nutrient value score nvs and explains how this metric can be combined with full supply chain analysis and costing to generate a new tool the omega value the use of the omega value allows policy makers who design a program with nutrition objectives to compare direct food transfers and commodity based food vouchers in terms of both cost efficiency and cost effectiveness 2013 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

famine in north korea causes and cures in this paper we start from incomplete data ridden with gross measurement errors to construct the underlying data base for a computable general equilibrium model cge of the north korean economy using cross entropy estimation techniques this model incorporates fragmentary information in a rigorous way and allows us to examine the implications of a number of alternative scenarios first we model a production oriented recovery program as the restoration of flood affected lands we then model an external assistance program as the acquisition of all food aid necessary to attain the united nations organizations estimates of minimum human needs the trade oriented recovery program is modeled as a relaxation of agricultural import quotas and the importation of food on commercial terms finally we model a systemic reform program as the elimination of quantitative restrictions on all external trade

cash versus direct food relief abstract the usual method of providing relief to a famine region is to import food and distribute it to the needy direct food relief if there are markets for food in the region however a relief agency could just as easily distribute money to the needy and let them purchase food in the market cash relief this alternative has been much discussed in the famine literature recently the purpose of this paper is to clarify the conditions under which cash relief will be more or less effective than direct food relief by analyzing the relative effectiveness of the two policies in a formal model

social protection 2 0 exploring issues evidence and debates in a globalizing world abstract this paper reviews the growing literature on social protection while not new the concept evolved remarkably in recent years it is approached from a multitude of perspectives and intersects with broader bodies of literature particularly around public policy pro poor growth rights humanitarian strategies and aid effectiveness as well as feeding into specific programmatic issues e g conditionality targeting and transfer selection this blend of challenges and approaches has often made debates elusive and polarized the paper examines the evolution and definitions of social protection and unbundles critical policy institutional and implementation quandaries taken together these considerations shape a set of context specific models of social protection the paper s five core conclusions may help chart future directions for social protection research and practice

budget deficits and coalition governments this paper shows that compromise between different ideological motivations within multiparty governments may result in a bias toward running budget deficits even if all parties in the coalition prefer balanced budgets the deficit bias increases with the degree of polariz ation of the ideological motivations and generally decreases with the degree of concentration of power within the government although the analysis is conducted assuming a proportional representation electoral system the results will also apply to majoritarian systems if the win ning party comprises ideologically different constituencies the relationship between budget deficits and multiparty governments is investigated using data from a sample of eight european union countries for the period 1971 1990 analysis on pooled data is partly in line with the theory time series within country analysis is less favorable we find clear support to the theory only in the case of italy

relief programs when it may be better to give food instead of cash abstract a standard way to give relief to the needy is to organize employment or public works programs it is often argued that in many situations paying workers in cash instead of food may be the superior option the aim of this paper is to caution that some plausible spillover effects may weaken this argument observe that paying wages in food and in cash can have differential effects on prices a cash for work program would typically enhance the demand for food cause food prices to rise and result in more food in the hands of those who have received the wages this will mean that those who are left out of the program for example the old and the infirm could be worse off

transparency political polarization and political budget cycles in oecd countries we investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance while some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies in contrast we show conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies using a sample of 19 oecd countries in the 1990s we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low er transparency countries while no such cycles can be observed in high er transparency countries furthermore we find in accordance with recent theory that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries

who surfs who manipulates the determinants of opportunistic election timing and electorally motivated economic intervention in this paper i develop a career concerns model of government policy choice within a dynamic optimal stopping framework to predict the degree of surfing opportunistic timing and manipulation politically motivated economic intervention under alternate institutional structures and voter characteristics among other results i find that the likelihood of opportunistic elections rises with exogenous economic performance with longer maximum term lengths with future electoral uncertainty and with economic volatility but diminishes in the value of office holding manipulation increases with the maximum term length and with the value of office holding but decreases with exogenous economic performance and with economic volatility the model suggests that single party governments should be highly opportunistic in calling elections and that countries that allow opportunistic election timing should experience less economically distortionary political intervention than their fixed timing counterparts

the next round game theory and public choice perspectives abstract the uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations proved to be unduly lengthy because of the absence of an adequate negotiating framework to resolve complex new issues although solutions have been found for many issues with the conclusion of the round others remain to be addressed and emerging issue will require resolution with a new round scheduled to start relatively soon it is useful to identify a negotiating framework that may hasten future discussions game theory and public choice are used as analytical tools to illustrate various scenarios that may help policy makers and negotiators identify with particular reference to agriculture the likely main issues bargaining positions and possibilities for compromise the complexity of the issues the divergence of positions between countries the absence of a dominant leader in world trade and the emergence of trade and negotiating blocs which lack a unified position are however factors that may make the next round of multilateral trade negotiations as protracted as the uruguay round discussion and research concerning the issues are required to facilitate the negotiation process

centripetal and centrifugal incentives in electoral systems this paper investigates how electoral laws affect the position taking incentives of parties and candidates it seeks to extend the finding presented in the classical median voter theorem to a wide class of electoral systems or to show the limits of such extension the factors examined are the district magnitude the electoral formula the number of votes each voter is allowed to cast whether voters can cumulate their votes and whether voters can partially abstain i suggest a crude division of electoral systems into those producing predominantly centripetal incentives and those producing predominantly centrifugal incentives among the factors found to produce centripetal incentives at least in noncumulative systems are the following increases in the number of votes per voter outlawry of partial abstention and decreases in the district magnitude in systems allowing the cumulation of votes matters are a bit different

additionality or diversion food aid to eastern europe and the former soviet republics and the implications for developing countries abstract substantial flows of assistance to eastern europe and the former soviet republics fsrs since 1989 have coincided with stagnating flows of official development assistance to developing countries raising concerns about the possible diversion of resources to the former from the latter these concerns are examined empirically for food aid which formed an important component of initial assistance to the region of eastern europe and the fsr using a supply based predictor model measuring diversion in terms of the difference between actual and forecast levels of food aid flows the model indicates that european union eu food aid including commission and member state actions largely involved additional resources there was however progressively greater diversion of us food aid from developing countries the findings are supported by a qualitative examination of the budgetary practices of the us administration and the european commission the two largest providers in financing their food aid to eastern europe and the fsr globally the combination of statistical and budgetary evidence suggests that between 10 12 million tons of cereals food aid or about 20 of shipments was diverted from developing countries to the region between 1989 1990 and 1993 1994

the right to food in the post cold war era abstract this paper reviews how the end of the cold war is affecting acceptance of key international conventions and the policy environment relevant to the realization of the right to food it focuses on the international bill of human rights and finds that ratification of international human rights conventions including those containing the right to food have accelerated from 1989 to 1994 the paper goes on to analyse the policy environment for the realization of the right to food in less developed countries in relation to worldwide sociopolitical processes of fragmentation and integration taking place in the post cold war era specifically civil conflict and cultural chaos liberalizing national and international economics the spread of democratic governance growing use of politically conditioned aid and reallocation of foreign assistance resources it documents and discusses each as an impediment or opportunity to the practical realization of the right to food through improved food and nutrition security the concluding section argues that the prospects for direct implementation of rights to food as national food and development policy have become unfavourable because such policies have been economically unsustainable and because of the declining capacities of government institutions in general at the same time the application of a normative human rights approach is found to be of critical importance for evaluation and promotion of food and nutrition security by the nation state and by transnational and subnational institutions that are growing more powerful in the post cold war era

food aid targeting in ethiopia a study of who needs it and who gets it abstract the need for systematic empirical analysis of food aid targeting and impacts is overwhelming especially given the large numbers of people concerned and volume of funds allocated to the problem of feeding ethiopia s food insecure this research examines the efficiency of food aid targeting in rural ethiopia based on empirical evidence from a nationally representative survey of 4166 farm households a key finding of the study is that there is no significant association between household food insecurity vulnerability and food aid receipts a result of high errors of exclusion and inclusion at both the wereda and household levels four factors are identified as causes of the high level of targeting error 1 the primary beneficiaries of food aid programs are found to be households at the extremes in terms of food availability those with the least and those with the most food available 2 a disproportionate number of female and aged heads of households received food aid irrespective of their food needs 3 an inability of the food aid system to reach households outside of the historically deficit areas and 4 a disproportionate concentration of food aid in the region of tigray

shifting sands the changing case for monetizing project food aid in bangladesh abstract monetization involves local sale of food aid commodities and using the cash to finance other programs to explore the likely consequences of monetization this paper combines a stockpile of recent microeconomic evidence from food and cash for work projects in bangladesh together with a multimarket simulation model results suggest that a switch from food for work s ffw in kind deliveries of wheat to an identical wheat financed cash for work cfw program would unambiguously improve welfare of the poor

nash equilibrium tariffs for the united states and canada the roles of country size scale economies and capital mobility a theoretical analysis of optimal nash equilibrium tariff rates is presented a numerical general equilibrium model is then used to find nash equilibrium tariff rates for the united states and canada the nash equilibrium tariffs are small relative to partial equilibrium estimates 18 percent for the united states and 6 percent for canada the united states is essentially indifferent between the nash equilibrium and free trade while canada is better off at the latter by 4 billion empirical results support theoretical predictions that the optimal tariff is smaller when the country is smaller there are scale economies and free entry and capital is internationally mobile

issues in valuing food aid the cash or in kind controversy abstract this paper focuses on developing a conceptual model to analyze the impacts of in kind transfers or payments of food for aid in particular attention is focused on the specific issue for food for work programs and the different methods of valuing these benefits there are three general methods used to value in kind payments 1 value at government costs 2 market value and 3 cash equivalent value no single method for estimating in kind values is uniquely appropriate and depends on the data availability and the end uses of the results the analytical approach is the standard economic model of utility maximization using indifference curves subject to a budget constraint adjusted to evaluate the effects of income in kind the analytical framework is then adopted to discuss some implications drawn from a recent ffwp evaluation conducted in ethiopia

agricultural trade liberalization and low income countries a general equilibrium multimarket approach integrated multimarket general equilibrium models are constructed to analyze the impact on poor cereal importers of rising world prices following oecd trade liberalization archetypes contrast african countries in which cereal imports are not competitive with domestic production africa i to african and asian countries where they are competitive results show rising food import bills and exchange rate depreciation in africa i and the opposite in the other two regions policy implications include promoting agricultural exports from africa i and promoting food crops for import substitution in the other regions food aid needed to shelter the poor during the transition period is calculated

how accurate is food for work self targeting in the presence of imperfect factor markets evidence from ethiopia effective targeting of transfers is a key issue in public policy to combat poverty much faith is presently placed in self targeting mechanisms such as public employment schemes supported by food for work transfers where targeting errors have been observed these are usually attributed to mismanagement of key operational details such as the project s wage rate using a unique data set from rural ethiopia we demonstrate that targeting errors may also have structural causes in some low income countries we hypothesise that imperfect factor markets generate a predictable dispersion across households in reservation wage rates that breaks down the unconditionally positive relation between income and shadow wages on which the theory of self targeting public employment programmes rests our results confirm that the inaccuracy of ffw targeting stems from the fact that in rural ethiopia higher income households are endowed with more labour per unit of land or animal due to poor factor markets in land and liv

making rules credible divided government and political budget cycles political budget cycles pbcs can result from the credibility problems office motivated incumbents face under asymmetric information due to the temptation to manipulate fiscal policy to increase their electoral chances we analyze the role of rules that limit public debt because borrowing is a necessary condition for aggregate pbcs since the legislature must typically authorize new debt divided government can make these fiscal rules credible commitment is undermined by either unified government or imperfect compliance with the budget law which can help explain why pbcs are stronger in developing countries and in new democracies when divided government affects efficiency voters must trade off electoral distortions and government competence

the effect of food stamp cashout on food expenditures an assessment of the findings from four demonstrations using findings from four demonstrations we examine estimates of the effect on household food expenditures of converting food stamps into a cash transfer we provide arguments for why the estimate produced by one of the demonstrations should be regarded as an outlier the disparity in the difference in means estimates from the remaining three demonstrations is reduced when each is normalized by dividing by the average value of benefits in the respective demonstration site the normalized estimates imply a reduction in food expenditures of between 18 and 28 cents for each dollar of food stamps cashed out at the aggregate level these estimates imply that nationwide cashout would result in a reduction in household food spending of between 4 2 and 6 5 billion dollars whereas the associated reduction in the cost of administering the food stamp program would be about 0 3 billion dollars

seeing the forest through the trees a meta analysis of political budget cycles despite a vast number of articles the political budget cycle literature contains many conflicting theories and empirical results i conduct the first ever meta analysis of this literature in order to establish whether a link between elections and government budgets exists using data on 1198 estimates across 88 studies published between 2000 and 2015 i find evidence of a statistically significant yet substantively small increase in government expenditures and public debt around elections and reductions in revenues and fiscal balance using meta regression analysis combined with bayesian model averaging i find support for some of the context conditional theories in the literature although the findings of political budget cycles are robust to publication bias as well as some of the methodological and study specific choices authors are forced to make they also shed light on how certain decisions may affect a study s findings this has implications for current and future research on political budget cycles

environmental food taxes and inequalities simulation of a meat tax in sweden abstract this paper investigates the distributional effect of an environmental tax on meat in sweden if such a tax was to be introduced welfare effects are measured as compensation variation cv for multiple price changes where hicksian cross price elasticities household expenditures and price changes are included in the calculations results show that taxes on meat are almost neutral over households when expenditures on meat are used as welfare indicators and regressive if income is used this can be explained by the households similar shares of total expenditures on meat the households with the smallest income levels need to be compensated with 904 sek per person and year equivalent to euro 86 6 per year in the year 2009 exchange rate to feel that utility is not lowered if taxes on meat are introduced and the households with the highest income levels need to be compensated with 1141 sek euro 109 3 per person and year for the year 2009 these compensations correspond to 0 74 and 0 78 of total expenditures for the low and high income group respectively when instead comparing the compensation with income levels the effects correspond to 0 99 for the households with the smallest income levels and to 0 51 for the households with the largest income

what drives program choice in food security crises examining the response analysis question over the past decade the analysis of food security crises has improved and a wider range of responses is available but the question remains is improved analysis driving program response choices in food security interventions this research considers the response analysis question in the horn of africa and documents the role of evidence and other factors influencing program choice based on interviews with donor agency and government staff this paper briefly notes existing tools proposes a road map for response analysis explores the way in which donor resources have changed and outlines major factors that constrain or shape response choice

project food aid and equitable growth income transfer efficiency first abstract this paper discusses the income transfer properties of food aid in order to shed light on the inputs necessary to ensure a contribution to equitable growth particularly with reference to the alleviation of poverty and malnutrition the author defines the concepts of income transfer efficiency and nutrition efficiency and shows that food aid which is income transfer efficient is usually also nutrition efficient some empirical evidence of the income transfer efficiency of different commodities supplied to various countries is reviewed and policy implications for the selection of food aid commodities and projects are discussed the author concludes with some working propositions designed to stimulate further debate on the selection and administration of food aid projects

the impact of food stamps on food expenditures rejection of the traditional model for food stamp recipients whose normal food purchases exceed their coupon allotment the traditional economic model predicts that the impact of food stamps on food spending will be the same as for an equal cash transfer the tobit analysis in this study indicates that for these recipients food stamps have a substantially greater impact on at home food expenditures than an equal amount of cash income these results reject the traditional model several possible explanations of this behavior are discussed

safety nets and index based insurance historical assessment and semiparametric simulation for northern ghana abstract this article considers index based safety nets aimed at assuring participants a minimum income at the village level set by a prespecified poverty line the participating villages collectively manage a pooled budget offering an index based per capita indemnity to the villages financed from a uniform per hectare premium possibly supplemented by an external subsidy the scheme involves implicit cross subsidies in favor of the poorest villages otherwise it focuses on covariate risk leaving it to mutual arrangements to deal with intravillage idiosyncratic risk its design is obtained from a risk minimizing model for the collective of villages with constraints of two kinds the first is the budget that ensures that payments receive adequate finances the second concerns the set of admissible schedules requiring that payments are triggered by a flexible function of only a few variables for this we propose a semiparametric form from kernel learning noting its capacity to combine a priori on the i

towards a theory of famine relief policy abstract this paper examines how famine mortality is related to the distribution of food consumption a theoretical model is proposed of how individual survival chances are affected by changes in consumption uncertainty in survival prospects arises from the errors made by any observer in assessing health at given current consumption the theory is used to explore two policy issues in famine relief the choice of budgetary rules for allocating emergency aid and the case for price stabilization policies during famines applications to data for two famines in south asia suggest that successful price stabilization would have had substantial benefits in reducing mortality