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Egypt experienced a worsening of their pre-existing food security issues during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In response to this, they expanded their cash-transfer program, Takaful and Karama, with the goal of improving household resilience to economic shocks by improving their program coverage. This project evaluates the expected outcome of this expansion by conducting an extensive literature review with a focus on the essential components of a successful cash-transfer program, these being: a cash-transfer program with impacts on poverty both in general and during emergencies, as well as an effective targeting of poor households to reduce inclusion and exclusion errors. The evidence from the literature review point toward the program being effective at targeting poor households, and having a moderately positive impact on beneficiary households both financially and in regards to education and health, as well as having a generally positive impact on households during emergencies, although utilizing this effect would require Egypt to expand the program during emergencies. The program is expected to utilize cash-transfers to increase the resilience of households against shocks by preemptively increasing household welfare to help cope with shocks.

This study contributes to the recent literature on geostrategic aspects of economic policy and the objective of economic security by addressing food security as a subcategory within economic security. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this study analyses whether and how the relevance of food security as a national policy goal has changed. It focuses on the questions of whether countries’ policy choices towards this objective have initiated longer-term strategic shifts, rather than just acute reactions, and analyses the extent to which these adjustments are influenced by underlying geopolitical considerations. To answer these questions, developments in food security policies are identified, focusing primarily on the perspective of security of supply. This perspective fits with the recent political focus and current initiatives by many countries aiming at national economic and supply security in general. The approach of this paper is to observe the evolution of policy arrangements over time in seven selected national country cases, one of which is the supranational entity, the European Union (EU). This paper does not seek to identify the effectiveness of different approaches concerning food security. Instead, it focuses on describing changes within three categories of food security policy approaches: domestic food policy (including both agricultural support measures to producers and domestic food aid programs for consumers); trade which can include market liberalization measures (e.g. reduction of tariffs) and measures that lean toward national autonomy and sovereignty (e.g. by setting standards); and crisis and emergency approaches (e.g. monitoring and alert systems). The selected country cases – Brazil, China, the EU, Nigeria, the Philippines, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US) – present a diverse set of conditions in te

Animal food products are featured prominently in current debates on dietary transitions. Food demand projections and policy evaluations often draw on expenditure and price elasticity estimates; thus, it is crucial that these elasticities are robust at an adequate product disaggregation, well-founded, and comparable both across products and countries. To the extent of our knowledge, there is no analysis providing meta-elasticities for all world regions, all food groups, and disaggregated animal foods. In this study, we cover this gap and collect a database with more than 50,000 demand elasticities from 444 studies and 87 countries. As 50% of our sample involves animal food products, we are able to provide food demand meta-elasticities for 14 food groups, of which ten are animal food. We present a set of estimated expenditure, own-price, and cross-price; unconditional and conditional; and uncompensated and compensated elasticities; and discuss their policy implications.

Few countries have declared sector-specific emission reduction targets in agriculture, making it difficult to construct and assess realistic climate mitigation scenarios for analytical and policymaking purposes. We aim to fill this analytical gap by using a set of cluster analyses to gauge likely ambitions levels in reducing agricultural emission at country-level, taking into consideration important country-level characteristics and referencing the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ principle. We then use the results from the cluster analysis together with information from submitted NDCs and other considerations to design formulas for assigning numerical reduction targets to individual countries. Our main results indicate a global agricultural emission level in 2030 exceeding the limit for the 1.5°C temperature target, but representing substantially lower emissions than the no-policy scenario. At individual country-level, the scenarios consist of large emission reductions in Northern and Western Europe, followed by the USA and other developed economies, and emission increases in many developing countries. To facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, our method also contains parameters for flexibility to scale up or down ambition levels at both country and global levels, making the method useful for other researchers to develop alternative scenarios.

China's increasing exports have prompted research to examine whether Chinese exports displace those that originate from elsewhere. In this paper we focus on the growth of China's exports to the East African Community (EAC) countries and show how they have affected exports from the European Union (EU). Our methodological contribution to the literature is a set of total and relative displacement estimates based on different specifications of the gravity model where we control for country–year fixed effects so as to avoid the error of not accounting for time-varying “multilateral resistance.” Our empirical findings do not support the hypothesis that Chinese exports have displaced exports from other countries including those from the EU. These results suggest that competition in the EAC market has not been a zero-sum game among different exporting countries.

The European Union (EU) recently declared its intention to implement a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) to address carbon leakage and competitiveness concerns associated with elevated climate ambitions in its Green Deal. Current literature points to uncertainties regarding the CBAM's effectiveness and compatibility with international trade rules. This study numerically evaluates how alternative EU CBAM designs under various international reactions affect global and regional GHG emissions, outputs and trade flows. Our modeling results confirm substantial carbon leakages and output reductions in the EU's emissions-intensive trade-exposed (EITE) sectors when implementing the Green Deal. We find that the design of the CBAM matters: while a “non-discriminatory” CBAM based on the EU's own scope 1 emission intensities fails to effectively reduce leakages, an ‘aggressive’ CBAM based on exporters’ scope 1 & 2 emission intensities can achieve such goal (albeit with potentially high implementation cost). International retaliations by non-EU countries can only partially offset the EU's gains from the ‘aggressive’ CBAM, while their cooperation can result in smaller losses to the EU EITE sectors and lower leakages. Finally, the CBAM cannot change within-EU imbalances in the EITE sectors, as several EU members lose EITE outputs consistently in all scenarios with and without retaliations.

Gravity models identify drivers of trade flows and thereby provide knowledge on the types of quality of market products to export to. The existing literature, however, does not consider quality of a market product differentiation that might be driven by different factors and that targets a specific type of market product. The purpose of this study is to identify the importance of a product quality and its influential drivers for international trade. The gravity model was separately applied in two different quality products using the price of transactions for pangasius between two countries relative to the average yearly export price as an indicator of a quality product. Export data from Vietnam to 46 countries during the period of 2007-2013 were used to identify the drivers and the results indicate that gross domestic product and population of importing countries are the most influential drivers for pangasius export. Results also indicate that the importing countries have a preference for high-quality product. In that case, distance and tariff rate are also influential drivers for high-quality product. This study may guide the potential exporting countries to identify which market to penetrate for higher profit.

Recognizing the urgent need for concrete sectoral information in designing European climate change mitigation pathways of policy relevance, this study formulates, simulates and compares 31 European decarbonization pathways, focusing on changes in trade flows and GHG emissions. This paper exploits the rich sectoral details from a large bottom-up built system dynamics energy model (the European Calculator model), soft-linking it to a tailor-made computable general equilibrium model (GTAP-EUCalc). Our modeling results suggest that increasing decarbonization ambitions leads to higher reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe (EU27 plus the UK and Switzerland), but with the undesirable outcome of decreasing its external competitiveness through worsened trade balance, if the rest of the world does not reciprocate Europe's decarbonization ambition. A comparison of results across pathways with varying ambition levels between demand and supply measures further reveals their differential roles: when keeping demand-side ambitions constant, elevating efforts on the supply side leads to larger emission reductions and bigger decrease in trade balance; however, holding supply-side ambitions unchanged and increasing demand-side efforts improves the trade balance while achieving larger emission reductions. Furthermore, ambitious demand measures avoid more losses of net exports when coupled with more ambitious supply mitigation measures. These results point to the need for coordinated demand and supply climate change mitigation actions across sectors, and to the benefits of climate-friendly lifestyle choices in not only reducing emissions but also in avoiding undesirable trade outcomes. Our results also demonstrate positive associations between increasing reductions in GHG emissions, worsening external trade balance, and rising carbon leakage rate for Europe. To safeguard the global effectiveness of European decarbonization actions, global cooperation under the Paris Agreem