IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fpr/esspwp/116.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The impact of large-scale social protection interventions on grain prices in poor countries: Evidence from Ethiopia

Author

Listed:
  • Hoddinott, John F.
  • Stifel, David
  • Hirvonen, Kalle
  • Minten, Bart

Abstract

There has long been concern that cash and in-kind transfers might affect prices in developing country food markets. While there have been a number of studies at highly aggregated levels, much less is known about the effects of cash transfers on local food prices and even less about how they compare to food transfers. We consider this issue in the context of a large social protection intervention, Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme. Using 12 months of price data from 233 localities and controlling for temporal, location, and market characteristics we find: Cash transfers have no effect on food prices. There is some evidence that food transfers reduce food prices. Maize transfers reduce aggregate grain prices, wheat transfers reduce the price of maize, and the negative effect of food transfers on food prices is larger in more remote markets. However, the magnitudes of these effects are trivially small, both in absolute and percentage terms.

Suggested Citation

  • Hoddinott, John F. & Stifel, David & Hirvonen, Kalle & Minten, Bart, 2018. "The impact of large-scale social protection interventions on grain prices in poor countries: Evidence from Ethiopia," ESSP working papers 116, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    • Handle: RePEc:fpr:esspwp:116
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ifpri.org/cdmref/p15738coll2/id/132348/filename/132559.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hirvonen, Kalle & Hoddinott, John F., 2018. "Payment modality preferences: Evidence from Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme," ESSP working papers 125, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    2. Gautam, Yograj, 2019. "“Food aid is killing Himalayan farms”. Debunking the false dependency narrative in Karnali, Nepal," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 54-65.
    3. Alan Gelb & Vijaya Ramachandran & Christian J. Meyer & Divyanshi Wadhwa & Kyle Navis, 2020. "Can Sub-Saharan Africa Be a Manufacturing Destination? Labor Costs, Price Levels, and the Role of Industrial Policy," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 20(2), pages 335-357, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ETHIOPIA; EAST AFRICA; AFRICA SOUTH OF SAHARA; AFRICA; food prices; poverty; food security; nutrition programmes; food policies; food transfer; cash transfers; Productive Safety Net Programme; social protection; D40 Market Structure and Pricing: General; I38 Welfare; Well-Being; and Poverty: Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs; O12 Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - General
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    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:fpr:esspwp:116. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifprius.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.