Food import demand with structural breaks, economic embargo and the COVID-19 pandemic in a wealthy, highly import-dependent country

Purpose - Qatar, a wealthy country with an open economy has limited arable land. To meet its domestic food demand, the country heavily relies on food imports. Additionally, the over three year-long economic embargo enforced by regional neighbors and the covariate shock of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated the country's vulnerability to food insecurity and potential for structural breaks in macroeconomic data. The purpose of this paper is to examine short- and long-run determinants of Qatar's imports of aggregate food, meats, dairy and cereals in the presence of structural breaks. Design/methodology/approach - The authors use 24 years of food imports, gross domestic product (GDP) and consumer price index (CPI) data obtained from Qatar's Planning and Statistics Authority. They use the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration framework and Chambers and Pope's exact nonlinear aggregation approach. Findings - Unit root tests in the presence of structural breaks reveal a mixture of I (1) and I (0) variables for which standard cointegration techniques do not apply. The authors found evidence of a significant long-run relationship between structural changes and food imports in Qatar. Impulse response functions indicate full adjustments within three-quarters of a year in the event of an exogenous shock to imports. Research limitations/implications - An exogenous shock of one standard deviation on this variable would reduce Qatar's food imports by about 2.5% during the first period but recover after the third period. Originality/value - The failure of past aggregate food demand studies to go beyond standard unit root testing creates considerable doubt about the accuracy of their elasticity estimates. The authors avoid that to provide more credible findings.