Soaring Food Prices: Poverty Impact and Incidence of Various Policy Responses in Africa

Tuesday, June 3, 2008
12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Jointly sponsored by the PREM Poverty Reduction Group and Africa PREM

Chair: Hassan Zaman (Lead Economist, PRMPR)

Presenters: Quentin Wodon (Lead Poverty Specialist, AFTPM) and B. Essama-Nssah (Senior Economist, PRMPR)

Description: According to a recent World Bank survey more than half the countries affected by rising food prices have reduced taxes or tariffs on foodgrains in an attempt to address this problem. Other measures include expanding school feeding programs and implementing labor intensive public works. This session discusses the likely impact on poverty of rising food prices as well as the effectiveness of various policy responses. This is done by first describing the main concepts/tools behind fiscal incidence analysis in both partial and general equilibrium settings and then presenting the results of recent empirical work in more than a dozen West and Central African countries. The empirical results show that the poverty impact and incidence of various measures varies substantially across neighboring countries.

Presentations:

• Impact of Food Price Increase on Poverty and Policy Responses Preliminary Findings from West & Central Africa, by Quentin Wodon (454kb PDF)
• Fiscal Incidence Analysis, by B. Essama-Nssah (108kb PDF)

Back to PovertyNet Home