India has pursued an active food security policy for many years, using a combination of trade policy interventions, public distribution of food staples, and assistance to farmers through minimum support prices defended by public stocks. This policy has been quite successful in stabilizing staple...

This paper analyzes the use of storage and trade policies to achieve food price stabilization in a small open developing country. Optimal stabilization policies are identified using a rational expectations storage model with risk-averse consumers and incomplete markets. Without public...

In times of highly volatile commodity markets, governments often try to protect their populations from rapidly rising food prices, which can be particularly harmful for the poor. A potential solution for food-deficit countries is to hold strategic reserves that can be called on when...

When food prices spike in countries with large numbers of poor people, hunger and malnutrition are very likely to result in the absence of public intervention. For governments, this is also a case of political survival. Government actions often take the form of direct interventions in the market...

In times of highly volatile commodity markets, governments often try to protect their populations from rapidly-rising food prices, which can be particularly harsh for the poor. A potential solution for food-deficit countries is to hold strategic reserves, which can be called on when...

Within an overall project to assess the ability of the agricultural sector to contribute to bioenergy production, we set out here to examine the economic and technological viability of a bioenergy facility in an uncertain economic context, using the stochastic viability approach. We consider two...

In poor countries, most governments implement policies aiming to stabilize the prices of staple foods, which often include storage and trade measures insulating their domestic market from the world market. It is of crucial importance to understand the precise motivations and efficiency of those...

We describe the methodology used to construct a global database of foreign direct investments in three dimensions (investor country, host country and sector) for 2004. Based on Eurostat data, we estimate theoretical investments for all countries. Then we constrain our estimates subject to...

This article compares various policies in a rational expectations food storage model with risk-averse consumers and missing insurance markets calibrated to represent a developing country. I consider an optimal storage policy under discretion and two optimal simple rules: a constant private...