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Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published August 16, 2012

How and When Is Poverty Transmitted from One Generation to the Next?

That’s the theme of a special issue of the Development Policy Review, published last month. The special issue contains papers on:

  1. Widowhood and asset inheritance in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Amber Peterman,
  2. How inheritance is a gendered and intergenerational dimension of poverty, by Elizabeth Cooper and Kate Bird,
  3. Inheritance practices and gender differences affect poverty and well-being in Ethiopia, by Neha Kumar and Agnes Quisumbing,
  4. Women, marriage, and asset inheritance in Uganda, by Cheryl Doss et al.,
  5. Intergenerational poverty traps in India, by my Sanford School colleague Anirudh Krishna, and
  6. Women and inheritance in Sub-Saharan Africa, by Elizabeth Cooper.

This is a very important topic considering that up until recently, we did not have good datasets tracking people over time. We had even fewer datasets tracking people and their children over time.

Published August 14, 2012

Drought and Food Prices: Yours Truly in the Media

Droughts, and the famines they cause, are rarely down to one factor.

“Food crises rarely, if ever, occur because of an overall lack of food to go around,” said Professor Marc F. Bellemare, an agricultural economist at Duke University in North Carolina.

“Rather, they occur because of structural and political problems. Sure, food is scarce in the Sahel, which makes it very expensive.

“But in most places, when food is scarce, food prices increase, which should in principle provide an incentive for traders to import food and distribute it to the areas that need it most.

“In the Sahel, a drought sparked the current food crisis, but poor infrastructure and conflict combined to create the perfect storm of constraints to food imports and food distribution.”

From an article in the UK version of Metro which was published last week.

And then there’s this, from AllAfrica.com:

There is potential to make and save a lot of money predicting the international market, but governments who have yet to, for example, integrate their own farmers into their country’s domestic agricultural market will find these tools offer little in the grand scheme of their concerns.

In many countries, farmers sell only to their neighbours or farm for their own subsistence, effectively barring them from domestic markets.

Marc Bellemare, a public policy assistant professor at Duke University, said tools like the Food Security Media Analysis are a “laudable effort … but what developing countries need is better infrastructure and governance.”

Countries that still lack access to even basics like decent roads will struggle to take advantage of new technology, in other words.

 

Published August 10, 2012

Hiatus

There will be few new posts over the next three weeks. I will be in Seattle from August 11 until August 16 for a bit of R&R and an NBER event on food price volatility.

I will then be in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, from August 18 until August 26 for the triennial conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists, where I will be presenting my work on food prices and social unrest.

I will be back at Duke on August 28 to teach the first of my two classes for the upcoming semester, but then I will be going to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in New Orleans from August 29 until September 2, to take part in a panel titled “New Directions in Environmental Security.”

If you happen to be in any of those places at the same time and would like to meet for coffee or drinks, email me.