The study analyzes food inflation trends in India over the last decade. Annual trends show that different commodities have contributed to food inflation in different years and that no single commodity shows uniformly high inflation. A decomposition exercise shows that eggs, meat, fish, milk,...

Policy making in food security is at a crossroads in India, particularly for the rice crop. Whereas India has emerged as a leading rice exporter over the last two years, the government has also introduced a large food subsidy program called the National Food Security Act. The program requires...

Researchers and policymakers have long understood the benefits of crop insurance but have been consistently disappointed by the poor performance of these programs. Rarely have programs seen sizeable take-up rates without support through large government subsidies, and in many countries, demand...

The extent of market integration and transmission of food price shocks is a major determinant of price stability and overall food security, particularly in developing countries. Few studies have examined these issues for countries in Central Asia, however. This paper aims to fill this gap by...

Can more vigorous political competition significantly raise rural land values, or contribute to more robust land rental markets? Exploiting exogenous variation in the national popularity of Pakistan’s political parties during the 2008 elections, we show that provincial assembly constituencies...

Estimating future demand for food is a critical aspect of global food security analyses. The process linking dietary changes to wealth is known as the nutrition transition and presents well-identified features that help to predict consumption changes in poor countries. This study proposes to...

Contract farming is emerging as an important institutional innovation in the high value food chain in developing countries including Bangladesh, and its socioeconomic implications are topic of interest in policy debates. This study is an empirical assessment to explore the determinants of...

Undernutrition remains a major source of human suffering and an obstacle to national economic and human development in many African countries. This report investigates undernutrition's persistence, drawing on case studies of the public response to the problem in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and...

Understanding the sources of domestic food price volatility in developing countries and the extent to which this volatility is transmitted from international to domestic markets is critical to help design better global, regional, and domestic policies to cope with excessive food price volatility...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of volatility between the corn, wheat, and soybean markets in the United States. Volatility interactions across markets, if they exist, may lower the effectiveness of diversification strategies to mitigate price risks and should be...