Category: Uncategorized

Imagine for a second what it would feel like if the New York Times were to mention your work in an article discussing your area of specialization.

For a Canadian, the equivalent feeling is when the Globe and Mail does so.

Barrie McKenna discussed my recent working paper with Nick Carnes in Monday’s edition of the Globe and Mail, in an article that primarily discussed the ideological inconsistencies of the Canadian conservatives when it comes to farm subsidies:

[E]conomist Marc Bellemare and political scientist Nicholas Carnes investigated agriculture-related votes from 1999 to 2009 to determine what factors drive the behaviour of politicians.

“The one explanation that almost always explains support for agricultural protection is the electoral pressure a legislator faces, i.e., the proportion of her constituents who are farm owners or farm managers,” the authors concluded.

In the end, the study determined that pressure at the polls is more important than lobbying and other influences. The result is that farmers wield out-sized influence, even in relatively small numbers.

…

Prof. Bellemare and Prof. Carnes point out that farmers are politically powerful because the vast majority of other voters are oblivious to what protecting farmers actually costs them.

Barrie’s article also discusses a poster presentation by Tolhurst et al., in which the authors look at the composition of the Parliament and the extent of agricultural protection in Canada.

The poster will be presented at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association meetings, which will be held in August in Washington, DC, which I suspect several readers of this blog will be attending.

(Note: This is the second of a two-part guest post by Catherine Herrold, a PhD candidate at Duke University whose dissertation looks at the relationship between philanthropic foundations and the Egyptian revolution. The first part was posted on Monday morning.)

The US assumed, incorrectly, that Egypt’s transitional government would allow it to bypass traditional bilateral aid channels and send grants unilaterally to both international and local democracy-promotion NGOs. Instead, the government waged a public war against civil society, placing international NGO employees on trial for meddling in Egyptian politics and instilling fear into Egypt’s own NGO community.

A less public but no less important outcry came from Egypt’s development community. Democracy, they explained, would not be built by promoting elections, funding fancy NGOs, or training budding party leaders in the ways of Western politicians. In fact, democracy was already being built locally around cups of tea and through legan (popular committees) as community members came together for the first time in decades to discuss problems, debate solutions, and set agendas for action. What was needed to sustain this newfound democratic spirit, development leaders interviewed in the course of my research argued, were funds for projects related to education, job training, and health care that simultaneously addressed Egyptians’ basic human security concerns and built their capacities to be engaged democratic citizens.

My newest article, “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia,” coauthored with Chris Barrett and David Just, is finally available on the American Journal of Agricultural Economics‘ website.

Here is the abstract:

How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? When governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This article develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illustrative empirical results based on panel data from rural Ethiopian households. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility are increasing in household income, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.

By “newest article,” I really mean “most recently accepted article,” for I have been working on this paper since early 2007. Because the paper innovates on both the theoretical and empirical fronts, and because it makes a point of fundamental importance for policy, I think this is my finest piece of research so far.

For a more complete discussion of this paper, see here.