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GTAP Resource #3775

"How Vulnerable are the Economies of the Middle East and North Africa to Global Food Price Shocks?"
by Ianchovichina, Elena, Josef Loening and Christina Wood


Abstract
There is a belief that households in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are largely insulated from global food price increases by government subsidies and other policies. This might explain why the literature provides little discussion of the domestic price effects of international food price shocks in MENA countries. A recent paper by Albers and Peeters (2011) presents information and price analysis on 6 MENA countries in the Mediterranean region. Although access to data has been limited, the shortage of analyses on the topic is surprising. Rising food prices are of concern in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Food security has featured prominently in public policy discussions and higher food prices have been cited as a contributing factor in the recent unrest (Breisinger et al. 2011). The region meets on average an estimated 50 percent of its food requirements through imports and is the largest wheat importer in the world.

To understand the severity of the risks stemming from international price volatility, it is important to have an understanding of the magnitude of food price pass-through to domestic food prices. To what degree international food prices effectively transmit into domestic prices in 19 MENA economies is largely an empirical question which is the focus of this paper. The empirical literature on the transmission of international food price shocks is abundant of studies that apply different econometric methodologies to isolate the effect of various factors affecting domestic price levels (see Anderson and Tyers, 1992; Quiroz and Soto, 1995; Baffes and Gardner 2003; Anderson 2010). Methodologically, analyzing food price pass-through is related to the broader literature of energy prices or exchange rate pass-through (see Chen, 2009; Campa and Goldberg, 2005; De Gregorio et al., 2007). The empirical strategies typically focus on the estimates and interpretation of short-run coefficients. Long-run co-integration evidence is conceptua...


Resource Details (Export Citation) GTAP Keywords
Category: 2012 Conference Paper
Status: Published
By/In: Presented at the 15th Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, Geneva, Switzerland
Date: 2012
Version:
Created: Ianchovichina, E. (3/26/2012)
Updated: Ianchovichina, E. (3/26/2012)
Visits: 1,423
No keywords have been specified.


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