Download or read book A Global Assessment of the Economic Effects of Export Taxes written by David Labordew and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study has been undertaken to understand and evaluate the potential negative consequences of export taxes which are implemented by many countries today and which are not disciplined by any international agreement. This paper uses a new detailed global dataset on export taxes at the HS6 (Harmonized System 6 level) level and the MIRAGE (Modeling International Relationships in Applied General Equilibrium) global computable general equilibrium model to assess the impact of export taxes on the world economy. We find that limitations on export taxes would have worldwide effects: the average export tax on global merchandise trade was 0.48 percent in 2007, with the bulk of these taxes imposed on energy products. The removal of these taxes would increase global welfare by 0.23 percent, which is a larger figure than the expected gains from the World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Round. Both developed and emerging economies, such as China and India, would gain from such policies, even if they currently impose export taxes. Medium and small food-importing countries without market power (such as the least-developed countries) would also benefit from the elimination of export restrictions, especially during food crisis situations. Both the energy sector and the export taxes implemented by Commonwealth of Independent States countries appear to play a critical role in the overall economic impact of such a policy change. However, the fact that some countries, such as Argentina, would experience income losses due to such a policy change is a major challenge to overall positive reform in this area.

Download or read book Macroeconomics agriculture and food security written by Díaz-Bonilla, Eugenio and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why write a book on macroeconomic policies and their links to agriculture and food security in developing countries? The food price spikes of the years just prior to 2010 and the economic, political, and social dislocations they generated refocused the attention of policymakers and development practitioners on the agricultural sector and food security concerns. But even without those traumatic events, the importance of agriculture for developing countries—and for an adequate functioning of the world economy— cannot be denied. First, although declining over time, primary agriculture still represents important percentages of developing countries’ overall domestic production, exports, and employment. If agroindustrial, transportation, commercial, and other related activities are also counted, then the economic and social importance of agriculture-based sectors increases significantly. Furthermore, large numbers of the world’s poor still live in rural areas and work in agriculture. Through the links via production, trade, employment, and prices, agricultural production is also crucial for national food security. Second, it has been shown that agriculture in developing countries has important growth and employment multipliers for the rest of the economy, and agriculture seems to have larger positive effects in reducing poverty than growth in other sectors. Third, agriculture is not only important for individual developing countries, but it has global significance, considering the large presence of developing countries in world agricultural production and the increasing participation in international trade of those products (these three points will be covered in greater detail in Chapter 1).

Download or read book Assessing the contribution of PIM to strengthening the capacity of developing country representatives to represent their interests in trade negotiations related to agriculture written by Bouët, Antoine and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2022-07-13 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this review is to assess the extent to which the research outputs of Flagship 3, cluster on The Policy Environment for Value Chains (cluster 3.1) of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) have been used to inform decisions and behaviors of representatives of government organizations, development agencies, researchers, donors, private firms, nongovernment organizations, and other users. The assessment both reviews the achievement of past milestones as well as looks forward to how re-searchers should support the trade agenda in developing countries going forward through their research and communication of research and what should be the focus in the research agenda for developing countries. There are already ongoing and forming activities for which strategic guidance, decisions on allocation of resources across activities, or other research decisions could benefit from this assessment. Areas for prioritization include evaluation of policy changes proposed by policymakers or proactively investigated by the PIM trade team (e.g., reduction in domestic support, lowering tariffs), a trade and nutrition database, work on trade and greenhouse gas emissions, future AATM editions, improving data on trade flows, analysis of impactful events such as COVID-19 and large-scale droughts on world markets and value chains, work on the future of trade multilateralism, research on global value chains and non-tariff measures, and research on advancing value chains for competitiveness and economic development.

Download or read book A Regional Computable General Equilibrium Model for Honduras written by Samuel Morley and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Factor endowments wage growth and changing food self sufficiency Evidence from country level panel data written by Keijiro Otsuka and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian countries have witnessed a sharp increase in real wage as a result of rapid economic growth and structural transformation in recent years. Using a country level panel data from 1980 to 2010, this paper examines the effects of real wage increase on Asian agriculture that traditionally used family labor intensively on small farms. The empirical evidence supports our hypothesis that an increase in real wages, along with absorptions of labor into nonagricultural sectors, has been inducing the substitution of labor by machines in agriculture. However, this process is less successful in the countries that are constrained by their small operational land sizes, resulting in lowered land productivity. We also demonstrated that dynamic changes in yield are an important determinant of food self-sufficiency ratio. The above findings imply that in the near future, Asian agriculture can face a challenge in maintaining domestic food production. Given the large size of consumer demands in the region and its increasing trend, the future path of Asian agriculture could be a significant constraint on the global food supply–demand balance.

Download or read book Agricultural trade What Matters in the Doha Round written by David Laborde and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper, we provide an overview of the agricultural trade negotiations within the current World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations and we show that including agriculture in the Doha Development Agenda talks is important both economically and politically, although the political resistance to reform is particularly strong in this sector. While agriculture accounts for less than 10 percent of merchandise trade, high and variable agricultural distortions appear to cause the majority of the cost of distortions to global merchandise trade. Within agriculture, most of the costs appear to arise from trade barriers levied on imports, since these barriers tend to be high, variable across time and over products, and levied by a wide range of countries. The negotiations face a need for balance between discipline in reducing tariffs—hence creating the market access gains that are central to the negotiations—and flexibility in managing political pressures. While the approach of providing flexibility on a certain percentage of tariff lines is seriously flawed, the proposed modalities still appear to provide worthwhile market access. Better ways appear to be needed to deal with developing countries’ concerns about food price volatility while reducing the collective-action problems resulting from price insulation.

Download or read book A Partial Equilibrium Model of the Malawi Maize Commodity Market written by Mariam A. T. J. Mapila and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-03-29 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper presents a model of the Malawi maize commodity market that is developed for use as a policy analysis tool. The model captures national and local maize market dynamics and the linkages existing within the maize market in the country. This research has been undertaken in order to provide policy makers with a robust tool which can be used to simulate the impact of policy changes on markets and households. Such a tool ensures the availability of evidence for informing food and agricultural policies. The model is a multiequation partial equilibrium model of the national maize market in Malawi. It is developed and linked in a top-down unidirectional manner to the local maize economy via a price linkage equation. A nonbehavioral arithmetic microaccounting approach is used to estimate rural household incomes that are linked to the local economy, through which macroeconomic-level maize price changes transmit. The model can be used as a tool for analyzing the impacts of macroeconomic and agricultural policy changes on the maize industry as well as on rural households that rely on maize. The novelty of the model is that it takes into account the interrelationships between farm/household, local-economy, and national maize market prices, as well as economic theory and existing empirical evidence, to build a framework that is capable of linking to the macroeconomy rural subsistence households that are traditionally deemed to have few or no backward and forward linkages.

Download or read book Parametric Decomposition of the Malmquist Index in an Output Oriented Distance Function written by Bingxin Yu and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-02-25 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The paper extends the methodology of parametric decomposition of the Malmquist productivity index using an output distance function. This approach addresses common methodological issues in total factor productivity estimation to produce credible and relevant results. The Malmquist index can be decomposed into several components: technical change (further broken down into technical change magnitude, input bias, and output bias), technical efficiency change, scale efficiency change, and output-mix effect. A translog output distance function is chosen to represent the production technology, and each component of the Malmquist index is computed using the estimated parameters. This parametric approach allows us to statistically test hypotheses regarding different components of the Malmquist index and the nature of production technology. The empirical application to Chinese agriculture shows that productivity grows at 2 percent per year on average from 1978 through 2010. The growth is mostly driven by technical change, which is found to be technology neutral.

Download or read book Evaluating the local economywide impacts of irrigation projects Feed the future in Tanzania written by Mateusz Filipski and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite years of development interventions, agricultural productivity in Africa south of the Sahara still trails far behind all other continents, leaving many rural populations in dire poverty. This suggests that our understanding of the impacts of agricultural development projects is still imperfect; perfecting it is likely to be a crucial step in achieving development. Projects that raise agricultural productivity, in addition to directly affecting farmers, can have an impact on local prices, wages, and rents, especially in rural areas of Africa, which tend to be less-than-perfectly integrated with outside markets. Price changes, in turn, transmit project impacts to others within the local economy. This paper presents the findings of a local economywide impact evaluation of Feed the Future irrigation projects in the Morogoro region of Tanzania, using a local economy-wide impact evaluation (LEWIE) simulation model. The findings indicate that these irrigation projects can generate important indirect impacts within the region. The structure of local markets, as well as labor and land availability, shapes project spillovers in ways that point to future directions for development assistance in the region.

Download or read book Evidence on Key Policies for African Agricultural Growth written by Xinshen Diao and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely agreed that reducing poverty in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) depends largely on stimulating growth in agriculture. To this end, heads of state in Africa rallied to form the pan-African Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) with the goal of raising investments and improving strategy implementation. However, while implementing an agricultural agenda under the CAADP framework, more and more countries have realized that increasing public investment in agriculture alone is not enough. Policy can play an important role not only to make public investment more efficient, but also is crucial for incentivizing private sector and farmer investment in agriculture. Against this backdrop this paper takes stock of current agricultural policies in SSA with a view to identifying policies that are working as well as areas for improvement. The paper examines policies to encourage the adoption of agricultural inputs, initiate greater private-sector investment in agriculture and agro-industries, and manage price volatility while encouraging openness. The paper further reviews successful land tenure policies and property rights systems, reviews the evidence on the synergies between agriculture and nutrition, and examines how CAADP is laying the institutional architecture for improved policy formulation in Africa. In general, the paper finds that although substantial progress has been made, there is considerable scope for improvement. This is not surprising given the relatively primitive and deeply rooted nature of smallholder farming in Africa. Evidence synthesized in the paper supports the view that most policies cannot be implemented in isolation. Rather, policies tend to be most effective when implemented along with complementary policies and public investments.

Download or read book Agriculture development and the global trading system 2000 2015 written by Bouët, Antoine and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is devoted to the complex relationship between the global trading system and food security, focusing on two important elements: the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) and how food price volatility can be managed, or not, through trade instruments. The first section of the book is based on the premise that more trade integration can fight poverty and alleviate hunger. The second section examines whether managing price volatility is doable through more or less trade integration. This section deals in particular with policy instruments available for policy makers to cope with price volatility: food stocks, crop insurance, and export restrictions. Analysis concludes that without a strong and efficient World Trade Organization (WTO) capable of conducting ambitious trade negotiations, the food security target will be much more difficult to hit.

Download or read book ASEAN International Law written by Eric Yong Joong Lee and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-13 with total page 663 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book consists of updated and refreshed papers written by international law scholars and practitioners from the ASEAN region and published by the Journal of East Asia and International Law, comprehensively covering almost all contemporary international legal issues related to ASEAN. Legal analysis of the ASEAN integration as one community with one vision in this book provides readers with a better understanding of the current social climate and future developments of ASEAN. Each section within the book covers a highly topical issue on ASEAN cooperation and dispute resolution from an international law perspective. ASEAN is one of the biggest economic communities in the world and the ASEAN+3 covers nearly half of global GDP. Given the region’s global impact, this book is of interest to Asia watchers, academics and policymakers alike.

Download or read book Food Price Volatility and Its Implications for Food Security and Policy written by Matthias Kalkuhl and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.

Download or read book How are farmers adapting to climate change in Vietnam Endogeneity and sample selection in a rice yield model written by Bingxin Yu and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vietnam is likely to be among the countries hardest hit by climate change, threatening its legacy as a champion in leveraging agriculture for development. This paper examines how a changing climate may affect rice production and how Vietnamese farmers are likely to adapt to various climatic conditions using an innovative yield function approach, taking into account sample selection bias and endogeneity of inputs. Model results suggest that although climate change can potentially reduce rice production, farmers will respond mainly by adjusting the production portfolio and levels of input use. However, investments in rural infrastructure and human capital will have to support farmers in the adaptation process if production levels and farm incomes are to be sustained in the future.

Download or read book Opportunities and Challenges for Community Involvement in Public Service Provision in Rural Guatemala written by Johanna Speer and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-03-11 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of the research summarized in this paper is to provide policy-relevant knowledge on the governance of rural services in Guatemala and thus to contribute to improving the provision of services that are essential for agricultural and rural development. Almost 10 years ago, the Guatemalan government decided to strengthen decentralization and community participation to improve the quality of public services, as well as access to these services for the poor, especially in rural areas. Based on quantitative and qualitative primary data, we examine how services are actually provided today and how community preferences and participation affect service provision in rural Guatemala. Our main finding is that the provision of formally decentralized services by local governments is incomplete. As a result, many rural communities continue to lack access to services, and some of them engage in supplying these services themselves. However, communities do not consider themselves to be more effective at service provision and would therefore prefer to be served by the government. Moreover, we find that community participation in the planning and evaluation of services has a positive impact on the responsiveness of the local government’s service provision. However, the effectiveness of community participation varies greatly among the examined cases, with several participatory governance bodies not functioning properly due to low education levels, poverty, and weak civil-society organization.

Download or read book Exchange Rate Policy and Devaluation in Malawi written by Karl Pauw and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Malawian economy has in recent months been plagued by a severe foreign exchange crisis, fueled in part by a steadily rising import bill, sharp successive declines in tobacco export prices, the suspension of direct government budget support from several development partners in 2011, and an all-time low in international investor confidence. Up until the regime change in April 2012, the government resisted calls for a devaluation, which at the time resulted in a thriving parallel foreign exchange market. At its peak, the Malawi kwacha was trading at a premium of up to 100 percent in this secondary market. Economic theory shows that such a situation has adverse implications for an economy in terms of the balance-of-payments adjustment process and income distribution in the economy. Those with access to foreign exchange at the official rate are able to extract rents by selling foreign currency or imported goods at inflated prices. Imports sold domestically are then often valued at the parallel exchange rate rather than the official rate, with the parallel market rate serving as the only adjustment mechanism through which equilibrium can be restored in the balance of payments. This has a significant impact on domestic inflation to the detriment of consumers, while those with preferential access to foreign exchange at the official rate capture large rents. A simulation exercise using an economywide model for Malawi considers how the economy responds to different types of foreign exchange shocks under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes. While the foreign exchange crisis in itself has severe negative implications for the economy, our results suggest that the economy responds much better to these types of shocks under a flexible exchange rate regime (that is, devaluations or a free-floating currency). Our main simulation shows that under the latter policy, gross domestic product growth, although negative, is 1.5 percentage points higher than under a fixed exchange rate policy. Similarly, poverty is 6.9 percentage points lower. A relaxation of the exchange rate policy, however, is only part of the solution; in the longer run, good governance and sound macroeconomic policy that is conducive to growth are needed to address the underlying structural problems in the economy that also contribute to foreign exchange shortages.

Download or read book Impact of Food Price Changes on Household Welfare in Ghana written by Nicholas Minot and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-02-25 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the global food crisis of 2007–08 and additional price spikes since then, greater attention has been given to the welfare impact of food price increases in developing countries. The standard approach in this type of analysis, proposed by Deaton (1989), is based on income and expenditure data from household surveys. Given the widespread use of this method, it is important to revisit the assumptions behind it and examine the sensitivity of results to those assumptions. In this paper, we explore the distributional impact of higher maize, rice, and food prices in Ghana and analyze the robustness of those results to changes in several key assumptions. The results suggest that higher maize and rice prices have a relatively modest short-term impact on national poverty but significant effects on specific groups of households. As expected, urban households lose from higher grain prices, but a surprisingly large share of rural households also lose because they are net buyers. The results also suggest that the current policy of protecting domestic rice producers with an import tax does not contribute to national poverty reduction, in spite of the fact that rice growers tend to be poor. If we relax the assumption that households do not respond to the higher prices, the effects are more positive or less negative, but only modestly so. On the other hand, if we relax the assumption that producer and consumer prices rise by the same proportion, and instead assume a constant marketing margin, the results change substantially. Because producer prices now rise by a larger proportion than consumer prices, the impact of higher prices is much more positive. These findings highlight the need for more research on the effect of price spikes on marketing margins.