{"title":"Agri-food trade channel and the ASEAN macroeconomic impacts from output and price shocks","authors":"Mala Raghavan, Faisal Khan, Evelyn S. Devadason","doi":"10.1111/agec.12811","DOIUrl":"10.1111/agec.12811","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines the diffusion of external (output and price) shocks to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) through the agri-food trade channel for the 1990Q1 to 2020Q4 period. For that purpose, the study develops a Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) model to simulate the region's economic resilience (output, inflation, interest rate and exchange rate) from various external shocks. We find that the agri-food channel is relevant in the shock propagation to ASEAN. There are more pronounced output effects on ASEAN from global output shocks relative to regional output shocks channeled through agri-food trade. However, the macroeconomic responses of ASEAN to global price shocks are not uniform due to the different consumption intensities of oil and raw materials, with negative and positive output effects from oil price shocks and raw material price shocks, respectively. Overall, ASEAN is more vulnerable to oil price shocks than to raw material price shocks. Our results emphasize that the distributional impacts of the agri-food trade channel and the ASEAN region's ability to mitigate the effects of global shocks depend on the degree of trade linkages and the region's capacity to counter the demand contractions and supply disruptions. The findings suggest that ASEAN should be cautious about the global shocks penetrating through the agri-food channel to address its macroeconomic vulnerabilities and better manage its economic resiliency.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"55 1","pages":"5-26"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138954572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Barchynai Kimsanova, Golib Sanaev, Thomas Herzfeld
{"title":"Dynamics of food demand during political instability: Evidence from Kyrgyzstan","authors":"Barchynai Kimsanova, Golib Sanaev, Thomas Herzfeld","doi":"10.1111/agec.12810","DOIUrl":"10.1111/agec.12810","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study assesses the impact of two revolutions—the Tulip Revolution in 2005 and the Melon Revolution in 2010—on household food demand in Kyrgyzstan. Different categories within food products witnessed distinct adjustments in consumer demand. Employing a complete demand system and seemingly unrelated regressions with nationally representative panel data, we find that household food demand fluctuates based on pre-conflict expectations. Despite declining total food expenditure during the first revolution and increasing in the second, the expenditure shares for staples and luxuries display heterogeneous trajectories. Food preferences shifted toward luxuries during the first revolution and staples during the second. Our findings underscore the necessity of a disaggregated perspective in understanding conflict-induced shocks on food demand.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"55 1","pages":"41-53"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/agec.12810","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138513570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mulubrhan Amare, Kibrom A. Abay, Patrick Hatzenbuehler
{"title":"Spatial market integration during a pandemic: Evidence from food markets in Nigeria","authors":"Mulubrhan Amare, Kibrom A. Abay, Patrick Hatzenbuehler","doi":"10.1111/agec.12809","DOIUrl":"10.1111/agec.12809","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper uses comprehensive and long time series monthly food price data and a panel dyadic regression framework to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated policy responses on spatial market integration across a diverse set of food items in Nigeria. The empirical results reveal several important insights. First, we show that a significant slowdown in the speed of adjustment and price transmission occurred during the pandemic. For some food items, the speed of adjustment and, by implication, spatial market integration weakened by two- to-threefold after the outbreak of the pandemic. The effect was especially pronounced for perishable food items. Second, lockdown measures and the spread of the pandemic triggered additional dispersion in market prices across markets. For example, lockdown measures were associated with a 5%–10% reduction in the speed of readjustment toward long-term equilibrium. Third, additional underlying attributes of markets, including lack of access to digital infrastructure and distance between markets, exacerbated impacts associated with the pandemic. For instance, access to Internet service reduced the slowdown in the speed of adjustment caused by the pandemic, but longer distances between market pairs induced greater slowdown in the speed of price transmission. Our findings offer important insights for revitalizing the efficiency of food markets affected by the pandemic. The heterogenous impacts of the pandemic across value chains and markets reinforce the need to properly target post-pandemic recovery interventions and investments. Finally, we offer some insights to reduce the vulnerability of food and market systems to disruptions in future pandemics or similar phenomena that inhibit food marketing and trade.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"55 1","pages":"86-103"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/agec.12809","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135037675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The distributional impact of SNAP on dietary quality","authors":"Jinglin Feng, Linlin Fan, Edward C. Jaenicke","doi":"10.1111/agec.12808","DOIUrl":"10.1111/agec.12808","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the nation's largest domestic food and nutrition assistance program for low-income Americans. Recent studies that examined the effect of SNAP on dietary quality focus on the average effects. Using the USDA's 2012 National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) and an unconditional quantile estimator, we examine the distributional impacts of SNAP on dietary quality as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2010 (HEI-2010). To identify the differential impacts of SNAP across the distribution of dietary quality, we exploit exogenous variation in state's maximum weekly unemployment insurance benefits and state outreach spending per capita as instrumental variables. We find that SNAP has no significant impact on households’ dietary quality on average. However, for households with initially low-to-intermediate dietary quality, SNAP participation reduces their HEI scores by over 17% or more than 7 points out of a total score of 100. The negative impacts of SNAP on these HEI quantiles are mainly driven by an increased acquisition of empty calories.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"55 1","pages":"104-139"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/agec.12808","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135186705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mobile phone network expansion and agricultural income: A panel study","authors":"Svenja Fluhrer, Kati Kraehnert","doi":"10.1111/agec.12803","DOIUrl":"10.1111/agec.12803","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study examines how the expansion of mobile phone networks affects rural development in Mongolia. The database is a detailed household panel survey with four waves implemented in western Mongolia, spanning the 2012–2021 period, which we combine with data on mobile phone towers. Our identification strategy exploits the uneven roll-out of mobile phone networks across rural areas over time. Using a two-way fixed effects approach, we show that network expansion strongly and significantly increases total household income of pastoralist households. The effect is driven by increased income from agriculture, particularly by higher producer prices for animal byproducts, improved access to transfer income, and increased household mobility. The expansion of mobile phone networks decreases income diversification among pastoralists. Instead, households specialize in agriculture. While findings suggest that investments in telecommunication infrastructure can help rural households to sustain a livelihood in the agricultural sector, the specialization in agriculture may increase households’ vulnerability to climate change.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"55 1","pages":"54-85"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/agec.12803","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135476554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Counterfactual evaluation of two Austrian agri-environmental schemes in 2014–2018","authors":"Reinhard Uehleke, Heidi Leonhardt, Silke Hüttel","doi":"10.1111/agec.12805","DOIUrl":"10.1111/agec.12805","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article investigates the causal effect of farm participation in two Austrian agri-environmental schemes (AES), Immergrün (<i>ground cover</i>) and Zwischenfrucht (<i>catch cropping</i>), on fertilizer and plant protection expenditures in the 2014 programming period. Combining European Farm Accountancy Data Network data with information on scheme participation from administrative control data offers identifying farm participation in specific schemes targeted at reducing input intensity. Given the overall small sample, we maximized the utilizable sample size by combining difference-in-difference and kernel matching with automated bandwidth selection. To address the remaining post-matching covariate imbalances, we used double machine learning (DML) techniques for a guided selection of potential confounding covariates. Our results suggest that, given the available sample, we cannot substantiate moderate effects of AES participation, and that guided covariate selection by DML offers no gain over non-guided covariate selection for the small sample. Our results underline the need to increase the number of farms and the duration in available farm panels to substantiate future counterfactual-based evaluations of policy.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"55 1","pages":"27-40"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/agec.12805","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135934764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labor elasticities, market failures, and misallocation: Evidence from Indian agriculture","authors":"Joshua D. Merfeld","doi":"10.1111/agec.12800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/agec.12800","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article presents evidence of misallocation across households in rural Indian agriculture. I show that household demographics predict own farm labor demand for smallholder farmers but not non-smallholder farmers. A simple model of labor allocation predicts a clear consequence of this duality: smallholder farmers will reallocate labor across plots less in response to price changes than non-smallholders. Detailed household panel data confirms this theoretical prediction. Three additional facts suggest that a lack of off-farm labor opportunities may be partly responsible for the behavior of smallholders, leading smallholders to over allocate labor to agricultural production. First, smallholders report fewer hours of involuntary unemployment when their own crop prices increase. Second, yield is substantially higher for smallholders on plots of the same size. Finally, estimated marginal revenue products of labor are consistently lower for smallholders.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"54 5","pages":"623-637"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50140594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christine M. Sauer, Thomas Reardon, Nicole M. Mason
{"title":"The poor do not pay more: Evidence from Tanzanian consumer food expenditures controlling for the food environment","authors":"Christine M. Sauer, Thomas Reardon, Nicole M. Mason","doi":"10.1111/agec.12799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/agec.12799","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We revisit the question of whether the poor pay more for food using household food expenditure data from Tanzania. We control for spatial factors that could affect food prices, namely, whether a rural household is in a peri-urban, intermediate, or hinterland rural zone (distinguished by distance to urban areas) and whether an urban household is in a primary city, secondary city, or a town. Our results differ from conventional wisdom. First, we find that the rich and the poor pay about the same price per kilogram on average for certain key Tanzanian food products like rice, maize flour, and cooking oil. Second, we find that poor households do not buy meaningfully smaller quantities per transaction than do richer households. Third, the rich and the poor also make roughly the same number of purchases per month for most food products studied. Lastly, we find that bulk discounts (a decrease in price per kilogram with an increase in quantity purchased) do exist, but only up to a certain quantity (with exceptions in some animal proteins), below which few households purchase. Hence, our evidence suggests that poorer Tanzanian households do <i>not</i> pay significantly more for key food products.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"54 5","pages":"638-661"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50142790","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Increasing the adoption of conservation agriculture: A framed field experiment in Northern Ghana","authors":"Kate Ambler, Alan de Brauw, Mike Murphy","doi":"10.1111/agec.12797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/agec.12797","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Conservation agriculture techniques have the potential to increase agricultural production while decreasing CO<sub>2</sub> emissions, yet adoption in the developing world remains low—in part because many years of continuous adoption may be required to realize gains in production. We conduct a framed field experiment in northern Ghana to study how incentives and peer information may affect adoption. Incentives increase adoption, both while they are available and after withdrawal. There is no overall effect of peer information, but we do find evidence that information about long-term adoption increased adoption, particularly when that information shows that yield gains have been achieved.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"54 5","pages":"742-756"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/agec.12797","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50119823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A semiparametric spatio-temporal model of crop yield trend and its implication to insurance rating","authors":"Kuangyu Wen","doi":"10.1111/agec.12798","DOIUrl":"10.1111/agec.12798","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We demonstrate the benefit of spatial smoothing for crop trend estimation with a deterministic spatio-temporal trend model. The proposed model is semiparametric, where the parametric temporal trend is modeled with a two-knot spline function for forecasting robustness, and the nonparametric spatially-varying coefficients are modeled by the radial basis function method for flexibility. To select the smoothing parameter of our trend model, we propose a forward validation criterion tailored to meet the forecasting nature of rating crop insurance. This criterion is based on a rolling regression approach that adds one year of data at a time for validation. We also propose a new criterion for model comparison using relative mean squared error in forecasting insurance payouts. Our empirical results show that the proposed trend model is more efficient and capable of identifying profitable insurance policies than two competing models in most state-crop combinations.</p>","PeriodicalId":50837,"journal":{"name":"Agricultural Economics","volume":"54 5","pages":"662-673"},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41734419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}