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Category: Economics

Published December 8, 2011

Food Crisis: Is the Sahel Next?

According to the European Union (EU), the Sahel region of Africa could suffer a localized food crisis next year. From an article in the Guardian:

Africa’s Sahel region faces a severe food shortage next year because of erratic rainfall and localised dry spells, the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid crisis response has warned.

Kristalina Georgieva said investing in the Sahel now was not just the ethically and morally right thing to do, but would be less expensive than waiting for disaster to strike, as was the case in Somalia.

Seven million people are already facing shortages in Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, with major shortfalls in food production in many areas. The figures point to a massive problem of food availability next year, according to the European commission.

The article then goes on to discuss how now is the time to act if we are to prevent a food crisis in the Sahel. This is especially true if aid takes the form of food aid, given how it for food aid to get to where it is going.

Here is a map culled from the FAO’s December 2011 Crop Prospects and Food Situation (link opens a .pdf). The countries in red are those most in need of food assistance. It indeed looks like the need for food assistance is concentrated around the Sahel and parts of Central Africa.

 

Published December 7, 2011

How Do the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest?

On Monday, I gave a Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar (MADS) at the Center for Global Development (CGD). According to the CGD website:

The MADS is a ten year-old research seminar series that brings some of the world’s leading development scholars to discuss their new research and ideas. The presentations meet an academic standard of quality and are at times technical, but retain a focus on a mixed audience of researchers and policymakers.

The title of my talk was “Food Prices and Riots: Estimating How the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest in the Developing world, 1990-2011.” I presented results from this paper, which I have often talked about on this blog. The slides for my talk are available here.

One of the interesting things about presenting in the MADS series is that you get a discussant. My discussant was my friend and colleague Ed Carr, who is an associate professor of geography at the University of South Carolina and who is currently on leave at the US Agency for International Development.

It was very nice to get Ed’s very insightful comments given how much work he has done on agricultural development and on the environment (he discusses a lot of his work in his recent book, Delivering Development). And given his expertise on climate change, Ed was the ideal person to discuss my paper, given my use of natural disasters to identify the causal relationship flowing from food prices to social unrest.

Published December 2, 2011

Timing and the Effects of Aid on Economic Growth

From a forthcoming article in the Economic Journal by Michael Clemens, Steven Radelet, Rikhil Bhavnani, and Sami Bazzi:

Recent research yields widely divergent estimates of the cross-country relationship between foreign aid receipts and economic growth. We re-analyze data from the three most influential published aid–growth studies, strictly conserving their regression specifications, with sensible assumptions about the timing of aid effects and without questionable instruments. All three research designs show that increases in aid have been followed on average by increases in investment and growth. The most plausible explanation is that aid causes some degree of growth in recipient countries, although the magnitude of this relationship is modest, varies greatly across recipients and diminishes at high levels of aid.