Working Paper
An exploration of the association between fuel subsidies and fuel riots
Between 2005 and 2018, 41 countries had at least one riot directly associated with popular demand for fuel. We make use of a new international dataset on fuel riots to explore the effects of fuel prices and price regimes on fuel riots. In line with...
Journal Article
Migrating out of mega-cities
Traditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this article, the author shows that in Brazil as...
Working Paper
The impact on the South African economy of alternative regulatory arrangements in the petroleum sector
This paper adds quantitative analysis to the study by Crompton et al. (2020), in which various alternative regulatory arrangements regarding the petrol price in South Africa were explored. We use a multi-sector dynamic computable general equilibrium...
Working Paper
Pandemics and their impact on oil and metal prices
We examine the effect of pandemics on selected commodity prices—in particular, those of zinc, copper, lead, and oil. We set up a vector autoregressive model and analyse data since the mid-nineteenth century to determine how prices reacted to...
Research Brief
Unlocking a regional plastics value chain between Mozambique and South Africa
Plastics are universal and integrated into different sectors of the economy. Industrial policy requires countries to look at moving up the value chain and producing progressively more sophisticated products to contribute to improved economic...
Blog
Reflecting Change: The Second Edition of ‘From Poverty to Power’
by
Duncan Green
November 2012
Duncan Green Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose the...
Blog
The Macroeconomic Management of Foreign Aid
by
Tony Addison, Tseday Jemaneh Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott,
Finn Tarp, Tuuli Paukkeri
January 2012
Tony Addison, Tseday Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott, Finn Tarp, Tuuli Ylinen To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor...
Research Brief
Policy processes and the global food price crisis 2007-08
The recent food price crisis and the responses of the policy makers in developing countries provide an unprecedented opportunity to analyse the policy processes in these countries. Policy responses differed depending on the nature and magnitude of...
Working Paper
China Urban Poverty and its Contributing Factors, 1986-2000
Food price increases and the introduction of radical social welfare and enterprise reforms during the 1990s generated significant changes in the lives of urban households in China. During this period urban poverty increased considerably. This paper...
Working Paper
International Trade, Food Security and the Response to the WTO in South Asian Countries
Agriculture contributes substantially to output and employment in South Asian countries. Therefore, any change, like trade liberalization, that impacts on the agriculture sector has widespread ramifications in terms of employment, nutrition...
Working Paper
Inflation, Output and Perfectly Enforceable Price Controls in Orthodox and Heterodox Stabilization Programmes
The paper deals with the success of price controls in stabilizing high inflation rates and their effects on the real economy under an imperfect competition setting derived by optimal maximization. Our model builds on Helpman’s work of price controls...
Journal Article
Commodity Prices and Intra-Household Labor Allocation
Volatility in commodity markets poses a distinct risk to farmers in developing countries who rely on cash crop agriculture. We combine a time series of international coffee prices with a long-running panel on coffee-growing households in Vietnam to...
Working Paper
The Impact of Domestic and International Commodity Price Volatility on Agricultural Income Instability
The extent to which commodity price volatility affects the income of producing households and their vulnerability to poverty and food insecurity depends on household diversification patterns and the degree of their exposure to markets. This article...
Working Paper
Falling oil prices and sustainable energy transition
Fossil-fuel subsidies are economically inefficient and harmful for the environment yet efforts to phase them out at the national and international levels have not been effective. The existing international legal framework is too weak and fragmented...
Working Paper
Regional Output Differences in International Perspective
Accurate regional estimates of output are desired as an indicator of level of development and as a variable used to explain internal migration, demand patterns, fertility and other aspects of behaviour. This chapter explores one often neglected...
Working Paper
Output and Price Fluctuations in China's Reform Years
The Chinese economy underwent cyclical fluctuations in growth and inflation in the reform period. Contrasting views exist on the role of money in such fluctuations. This paper assesses these views employing structural VEC models based on the exchange...
Working Paper
Monetary Policy in the Franc Zone
This paper examines to what extent the central bank for the West African Economic and Monetary Union (BCEAO) has used interest rate policy in response to domestic economic developments. We show that while in the long run the BCEAO matches changes in...
Working Paper
Revisiting the Global Food Architecture
The 2008 episode of food price explosion, political turmoil, and human suffering revealed important flaws in the current global food architecture. This paper argues that to safeguard the strengths of the current system, four failures in market...
Working Paper
Coffee price volatility and intra-household labour supply
Volatility in commodity markets poses an acute risk to farmers in developing countries who rely on cash crop agriculture. We combine a time series of international coffee prices with a long-running panel on coffee-growing households in Vietnam to...
Working Paper
The Long-Run Behaviour of the Terms of Trade between Primary Commodities and Manufactures
This study examines the Prebisch and Singer hypothesis using a panel of 24 commodity prices from 1900 to 2010. The modelling approach stems from the need to meet two key concerns: (1) the presence of cross-sectional dependence among commodity prices...
Research Brief
The political economy of food price policy in China
The global food crisis in 2007–08 raised concerns everywhere, including in China. However, despite China’s highly-integrated domestic and international markets for many agricultural commodities, the effect of the crisis in China was only moderate...
Working Paper
The recent evolution of consumption poverty in Rwanda
This paper analyses the evolution of consumption poverty in Rwanda between 2001/1 and 2010/11, using three comparable good quality household surveys analysed along with detailed price data. Rwanda achieved impressive growth over this period. The...
Journal Article
When do relative prices matter for measuring income inequality?
Changes in relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups can be expected to alter real income differentials between these groups. Using Mozambican household budget survey and price data from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we...
Blog
Getting Serious About Food
by
Luc Christiaensen
August 2009
Luc Christiaensen Senior Research Fellow at UNU-WIDER At the G8 July summit in Aquila, Italy, US$ 20 billion was pledged to support farmers in poorer...
Working Paper
The Impact of Food Price Volatility on Consumer Welfare in Cameroon
The objective of this paper is to analyse the welfare effects of food price volatility on Cameroonian consumers. Using data from the third Cameroonian Household Consumption Surveys, the price elasticities are obtained from a Quadratic Almost Ideal...
Journal Article
Transmission of World Prices to the Vietnamese Economy
International economic integration has been a central policy goal for the Vietnam government since the doi moi reform was initiated in 1986. We explore the Vietnamese increasing integration into the world market and bouts of high inflation. Five...
Working Paper
When do Relative Prices Matter for Measuring Income Inequality?
Changes in the relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups are known to influence real measures of inequality. Using household budget survey and price data in Mozambique from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we show that...
Working Paper
Poverty, Inequality, and Prices in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Post-apartheid poverty and inequality trends have been the subject of intensive analysis, yet relatively little attention has been devoted to the impact of differential price movements on the measurement of poverty and inequality. This paper aims to...
Working Paper
Distributional Impacts of the 2008 Global Food Price Spike in Vietnam
Agriculture and food cultivation production remains a key sector in the Vietnamese economy in terms of productive activities, income generation, and national export earnings. Higher world market prices should therefore in principle have a beneficial...
Working Paper
When do Relative Prices Matter for Measuring Income Inequality?
Changes in relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups can be expected to alter real income differentials between these groups. Using Mozambican household budget survey and price data from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we...
Working Paper
Commodity Price Fluctuations and Macro-economic Adjustments in the Developed Countries
Commodity price fluctuations have been troublesome in their destabilising effects on the foreign exchange earnings of developing countries. Recently, however, attention has been drawn to their role in transmitting inflation and in inducing...
Working Paper
The role of the construction sector in Ghana
The research explores the structure and performance of Ghana’s construction subsector, in light of the country’s 2007 oil discovery. Using primary and secondary data resources, we discuss how marginal costs and expenditure shocks may vary within the...