The cost of operating the Food Security Commodity Reserve as a commodity reserve was compared with the cost of a cash reserve to purchase food aid supplies only in the period of need. Preliminary simulation results reveal the cash reserve to be less costly in almost all cases.

We assess the relative impacts of receiving cash versus food transfers using a randomized design. Drawing on data collected in eastern Niger, we find that households randomized to receive a food basket experienced larger, positive impact on measures of food consumption and diet quality than...

Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or any subsequent set of goals aiming to reduce poverty worldwide. Related research has developed a multitude of instruments to measure pro-poor growth using absolute and...

The Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011 had mixed effects on the poor in developing nations. By some estimates, the Crisis lifted nearly 24 million poor farmers out of poverty; however, it also cast 68 million net food buyers into poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional impacts...

A growing body of research supports the \economic insecurity" theory of obesity, which posits that uncertainty with respect to one's material well- being may be an important root cause of the modern obesity epidemic. This literature has been limited in the past by a lack of reliable measures of...

We test the hypotheses that subsidies on hybrid seed change maize production, total household income, the severity of poverty, and relative deprivation among smallholder maize growers in Zambia. The analysis contributes to the literature by measuring the quantitative effects of seed (as compared...