Category: Uncategorized

When given additional income, how much do the poor choose to spend on food? This deceivingly simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer and has preoccupied many generations of economists. For starters, do observed correlations between income and food demand truly capture the effect of income on food demand, or do they also capture the effect of confounding factors?
 
In a new paper titled “Income and the Demand for Food Among the Poor,” my coauthors Eeshani Kandpal, Katherina Thomas, and I revisit these age-old questions. To do so, we aggregate publicly-available data from five randomized evaluations of conditional cash transfers in five countries across three continents: two in Mexico, one in Nicaragua, one in the Philippines, and one in Uganda. We first define the demand for food as how much recipients spend on food (i.e., food expenditures). We then look at the impact of (i) being assigned to receiving a conditional cash transfer, and (ii) extra income on food expenditures overall as well as on expenditures on staples, protein, fruits and vegetables, and other foods.

Right on time for conference season (e.g., CAES in Winnipeg next week, AAEA in New Orleans at the end of the month, and ICAE in Delhi in early August), here are the newly released Journal Citations Report, here is the new top 5 of journals in the “agricultural economics and policy” category:

1. Food Policy 6.8
2. Agricultural Economics 4.5
3. China Agricultural Economic Review 4.4
4. Annual Review of Resource Economics 4.2
5. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 4.2

In 2018, in the midst of the longest economic expansion in US history, national and international media outlets were citing commodity prices and financial stress as significant factors affecting the mental health of US farmers.

Most such stories drew parallels between then-current agricultural conditions and the conditions faced by farmers during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when 900 farmers died by suicide in response to farm debt doubling in the early 1980s. As a result, those same stories often emphasized farmer suicides and the unique set of risk factors associated with agriculture, noting that, between 2014 and 2018, 450 farmers had killed themselves.