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...

This paper analyzes food price stabilization policies in a small, open, developing country. Without public intervention, price dynamics are driven by domestic productive shocks and international prices. Trade and/or storage policies are optimally designed to increase welfare, in a context where...

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...

This paper compares numerical methods for solving the competitive storage model. Because storage implies a nonnegativity constraint on stocks, the solution methods must be considered carefully. The model is solved using value function iteration and several projection approaches, including...

The purpose of this Research Memorandum is to propose an approach to incorporating forest access cost functions into global general equilibrium models such as GTAP. Towards this end, we develop a long run access cost function which can be calibrated to national data on total forest land,...