Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation and Poverty

Kym Anderson, Maros Ivanic and Will Martin

No 19530, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes--reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints--were meant to partially insulate domestic markets from the spike in international prices. The authors find that this insulation added substantially to the spike in international prices for rice, wheat, maize, and oilseeds. As a result, although domestic prices rose less than they would have without insulation in some developing countries, in many other countries they rose more than they would have in the absence of such insulation. The paper's second purpose it to estimate the combined impact of such insulating behavior on poverty in various developing countries and globally. The analysis finds that the actual poverty-reducing impact of insulation is much less than its apparent impact, and that its net effect was to increase global poverty in 2008 by 8 million people, although this increase was not significantly different from zero. The paper examines the relative efficiency and equity of trade restrictions and domestic policies, such as conditional cash transfers, than are designed to provide social protection for the poor when international food prices spike. It also examines the potential consequences of multilateral agreements to limit changes in restrictions on trade during such times.

JEL-codes: F13 Q02 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
Note: ITI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

Published as Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation, and Poverty , Kym Anderson, Maros Ivanic, William J. Martin. in The Economics of Food Price Volatility , Chavas, Hummels, and Wright. 2014

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19530.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation, and Poverty (2014)
Working Paper: Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation and Poverty (2013)
Working Paper: Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation, and Poverty (2013)
Working Paper: Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation, and Poverty (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19530

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19530

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).