Gustavo Anríquez

Rising Food Prices and Undernourishment - A Cross-Country Inquiry

Households’ welfare in developing countries has been hit by dramatic food prices increases which occurred between 2005 and 2008. In this paper, we adopt a partial equilibrium approach to analyze the short-time effects of a staple food price increase on nutritional attainments, as a measure of welfare. The analysis consists of first approximating complete food-demand systems and then performing household level micro-simulations. Instead of focusing on a single country profile, we provide a more complete snapshot by comparing the evidence through a cross-country assessment made possible by the use of nationally representative household surveys. Comparability is assured by the adoption of the same methodological choices in the treatment of the micro data. We find that food price spikes not only reduce the mean consumption of dietary energy, but also worsen the distribution of food calories, further deteriorating the nutritional status of populations. We also discovered that access to agricultural land plays a significant role in ensuring adequate nutritional attainments in rural areas, and surprisingly, even in urban areas.

An Extended Cross-Country Database for Agricultural Investment and Capital

This paper presents a database of investment and capital in agriculture, an essential input for cross-country macro analysis of the primary sector of the economy. Our work stems from the innovative research undertaken by Larson et al. (2000). With respect to these authors, we extend country coverage and time span. Further we introduce some refinements to the methodology used to construct the series of fixed capital stock by changing how the agricultural GDP and investment is forecasted. Finally we document in details our data sources and the STATA program used to implement all the methods.

Public Expenditures and the Performance of Latin American and Caribbean Agriculture

Economic theory and econometric evidence support the thesis that the displacement of government expenditures on public goods by subsidies to private goods inhibits the performance of the farm sector. This paper presents an analysis of the influence of the mix of expenditures related to agriculture on net income generation, using data for 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries during 1985-2012. The econometric results demonstrate that total government spending on the farm sector positively impacts agricultures performance. More importantly, and of greater practical economic significance, increasing the share of expenditures committed to public goods, ceteris paribus, would significantly raise rural income as measured by sector value added per capita of the rural population.