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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Duncan Green Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose the...
Tony Addison, Tseday Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott, Finn Tarp, Tuuli Ylinen To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth...
The significance of commodity price instability for the economic development of commodity-exporting countries has been perhaps the dominant theme in the postwar literature on the "commodity problem". One of the contending postwar views of the...
This paper re-examines the current debate on price scissors based on an extended framework, in which the production and trade of industrial consumer goods within the rural sector is incorporated. It confirms that in the economy considered by...
The construction sector plays a critical role in delivering quality infrastructure, which in turn influences the use of natural resource revenues towards achieving structural change and industrial development. We use industrial organization and...
The emergence of the euro as a key currency, perhaps eventually rivalling the US dollar in importance, may have important macroeconomic implications for industrial as well as developing economies in the years ahead. This paper focuses on two related...
Tony Addison With the ice floes now gone from the harbour outside the UNU-WIDER building, and with the snow replaced by an icy hail, there is a...
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tony Addison As we come to the end of November, the snow has yet to arrive in Helsinki. We continue to enjoy clear skies and spectacular sunsets...
Prior to 2009, there was no direct road connection between the southern regions of Mozambique—where the capital city is located—and the more agriculturally-productive central and northern regions. In this paper, we leverage the opening of a major...
A one-good, representative consumer model of the pre-reform consumer sector of transition economies is developed. An equation is derived that permits empirical estimation of the welfare effect of price liberalization. Empirical estimates are...
This paper applies a new decomposition technique to the study of variations in poverty across the regions of Russia. The procedure, which is based on the Shapley value in cooperative game theory, allows the deviation in regional poverty levels from...
The paper considers the macroeconomic impact of shocks to agricultural output and of negative and positive price shocks. It is shown that negative price shocks have particularly large externalities: it is estimated that the overall impact of these...
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