[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/col/000425/008580.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Perfect Storm or an Opportunity for Latin America: High World Commodity Prices

Author

Listed:
  • Maximo Torero
  • Miguel Robles
Abstract
The current food price crisis could have an important effect of the poorest in Latin America. Although the region is fairly immune to external shocks the food price crisis have severely affect all the LA countries in terms of inflation, especially food inflation and its impact is even higher in net importing countries and on poor consumers in peri‐urban and rural areas. In this paper we review the modeling options to measure these effects and we propose to separate the analyses in two steps. First, one should try to understand how shocks in international prices are transmitted to domestic prices; and second for a given change in prices analyze the welfare impact among households. In this paper we discuss the empirical modeling options to account for price transmission and welfare effects and we also provide our own empirical estimates for welfare effects at the household level, using a quadratic AIDS estimation, for two Latin American countries: Honduras and Peru. Our empirical estimations for the welfare effects due to high food prices reveal that in Honduras national poverty might potentially be reduced in 3.5 percent points. In the case of Peru our evidence shows that national poverty is increased by 0.3 percent points. However these figures hinder important differences across different groups and therefore that there is a need for transfer‐based strategy for the extreme poor but this can only be a stop‐gap solution, and only a targeted investment approach will be able to permanently reduce the vulnerability of the poor to the food price crisis.

Suggested Citation

  • Maximo Torero & Miguel Robles, 2010. "A Perfect Storm or an Opportunity for Latin America: High World Commodity Prices," Economía Journal, The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association - LACEA, vol. 0(Spring 20), pages 117-163, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:col:000425:008580
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://economia.lacea.org/contents.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    food price crisis; AIDS estimation; welfare effects; poverty; Peru; Honduras;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • Q02 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - General - - - Commodity Market

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:col:000425:008580. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LACEA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/laceaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.