Person:
Nash, John Davidson
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
agriculture and rural development; trade policy; environment and climate change; natural resource management
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Sustainable Development Department, Africa Region, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
John Nash is currently Lead Economist in the Sustainable Development Department of the Sub-Saharan Africa Region of the World Bank. He holds an MSc and PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and a BS in economics from Texas A&M University. Prior to joining the World Bank in 1986, he was an assistant professor at Texas A&M University, and an economic advisor to the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission of the US. At the Bank, John has served in LAC, DEC, ARD, and ECA. His most recent major publications are the regional reports (co-authored)
Low Carbon, High Growth: Latin American Responses to Climate Change,
Natural Resources in Latin America and the Caribbean: Beyond Booms and Busts? , and
Agricultural Exports from Latin America and the Caribbean: Harnessing Trade to Feed the World and Promote Development; and
Unlocking Africa's Agricultural Potential : an Action Agenda for Transformation. He is married with a daughter who teaches in the Baltimore City School District and a son. He loves to ski in the winter and scuba in the summer with his wife, Sarah.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 18
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Publication
Food and Agricultural Policy in Russia : Progress to Date and the Road Forward
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2002-07)The overall finding of this report is that much agricultural policy is made at the regional level, and here the explicit price, and trade policy distortions are significantly worse than at the federal level. The result is patchwork of inconsistent policies, that has fragmented the Russian national market. The most serious policy issues at the federal level, are in the legal framework, the continued state domination of some markets, and, the administration of limited subsidies, in ways that undermine market development. A major problem is that large farms face soft budget constraints, with tolerance of non-payment of debt, resulting in an increasing debt burden, little incentive for true restructuring, and an uneven playing field with respect to the private sector. The government recently addressed the issue of farm insolvency, through the Resolution on Agricultural Debt Restructuring, and, a fundamental approach to this problem is being elaborated in the draft Law on Financial Rehabilitation of Agricultural Enterprises. But the key to giving enterprises an incentive to participate in real restructuring, will be to enforce sanctions - including bankruptcy procedures, and foreclosure - if enterprises fail to comply with the terms, and measures developed by creditors, and investors, as part of the restructuring procedures. A supportive environment of private individual farming, and private market development should be created, by revamping agricultural support policies, that halt public procurement at federal, and regional levels; that administer all subsidies to producers, by some incentive-neutral mechanism, not dependent on input usage, or output; and, where input, or credit subsidies continue, if administered by private channels on a competitive basis, not through state-owned, or monopoly suppliers. -
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Deregulating the Transfer of Agricultural Technology : Lessons from Bangladesh, India, Turkey, and Zimbabwe
(World Bank, 2002)Many transition and developing economies have reduced direct public involvement in the production and trade of seed and other agricultural inputs. This trend creates opportunities for farmers to realize improved access to inputs, including technology from international private research. Unfortunately, input regulations often derail these opportunities by blocking private entry and the introduction of private technology. This study looks at the experience in Bangladesh, India, Turkey, and Zimbabwe to see whether regulations make a difference in agriculture and input industries in developing economies. In all countries, companies and farmers responded to regulatory reforms by introducing and adopting more new technology and by expanding the production, trade, and use of inputs. The increased use of private technology has brought higher yields and incomes, allowing farmers and consumers to reach higher levels of welfare. These results challenge governments to open their regulatory systems to allow market entry and the introduction of private technology through seeds and other inputs. -
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Reforming Agricultural Trade for Developing Countries : Volume 1. Key Issues for a Pro-Development Outcome of the Doha Round
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007)Reforming agricultural trade for developing countries is a two-volume set. The first volume is subtitled Key issues for a pro- development outcome of the Doha Round, and it is focused on specific concerns that are being encountered in the agricultural negotiations, and on strategies for dealing with them to arrive at a final agreement that will significantly spur growth and reduce poverty in developing countries. The companion volume is subtitled Quantifying the impact of multilateral trade reform. It comprises chapters that take different approaches to modeling trade reform and quantifying the resulting benefits and costs to various players in the negotiations. The study explains the differences in results that come out of these different approaches, and compares them to some other recent estimates of the gains from global trade reform. -
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Infrastructure in Conflict-Prone and Fragile Environments: Evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05)In conflict-prone situations, access to markets is necessary to restore economic growth and generate the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence, the rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has emerged as an overarching investment priority among donors and governments. This paper brings together two distinct strands of literature on the effects of conflict on welfare and on the economic impact of transport infrastructure. The theoretical model explores how transport infrastructure affects conflict incidence and welfare when selection into rebel groups is endogenous. The implications of the model are tested with data from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The analysis addresses the problems of the endogeneity of transport costs and conflict using a novel set of instrumental variables. For transport costs, a new instrument is developed, the natural-historical path, which measures the most efficient travel route to a market, taking into account topography, land cover, and historical caravan routes. Recognizing the imprecision in measuring the geographic impacts of conflict, the analysis develops a spatial kernel density function to proxy for the incidence of conflict. To account for its endogeneity, it is instrumented with ethnic fractionalization and distance to the eastern border. A variety of indicators of well-being are used: a wealth index, a poverty index, and local gross domestic product. The results suggest that, in most situations, reducing transport costs has the expected beneficial impacts on all the measures of welfare. However, when there is intense conflict, improvements in infrastructure may not have the anticipated benefits. The results suggest the need for more nuanced strategies that take into account varying circumstances and consider actions that jointly target governance with construction activities. -
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Transport Infrastructure and Welfare: An Application to Nigeria
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05)Transport infrastructure is deemed to be central to development and consumes a large fraction of the development assistance envelope. Yet there is debate about the economic impact of road projects. This paper proposes an approach to assess the differential development impacts of alternative road construction and prioritize various proposals, using Nigeria as a case study. Recognizing that there is no perfect measure of economic well-being, a variety of outcome metrics are used, including crop revenue, livestock revenue, non-agricultural income, the probability of being multi-dimensionally poor, and local gross domestic product for Nigeria. Although the measure of transport is the most accurate possible, it is still endogenous because of the nonrandom placement of road infrastructure. This endogeneity is addressed using a seemingly novel instrumental variable termed the natural path: the time it would take to walk along the most logical route connecting two points without taking into account other, bias-causing economic benefits. Further, the analysis considers the potential endogeneity from nonrandom placement of households and markets through carefully chosen control variables. It finds that reducing transportation costs in Nigeria will increase crop revenue, non-agricultural income, the wealth index, and local gross domestic product. Livestock sales increase as well, although this finding is less robust. The probability of being multi-dimensionally poor will decrease. The results also cast light on income diversification and structural changes that may arise. These findings are robust to relaxing the exclusion restriction. The paper also demonstrates how to prioritize alternative road programs by comparing the expected development impacts of alternative New Partnership for Africas Development projects. -
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Agricultural Technology Choice and Transport
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-05)This paper addresses an old and recurring theme in development economics: the slow adoption of new technologies by farmers in many developing countries. The paper explores a somewhat novel link to explain this puzzle -- the link between market access and the incentives to adopt a new technology when there are non-convexities. The paper develops a theoretical model to guide the empirical analysis, which uses spatially disaggregated agricultural production data from Spatial Production Allocation Model and Living Standards Measurement Study survey data for Nigeria. The model is used to estimate the impact of transport costs on crop production, the adoption of modern technologies, and the differential impact on returns of modern versus traditional farmers. To overcome the limitation of data availability on travel costs for much of Africa, road survey data are combined with geographic information road network data to generate the most thorough and accurate road network available. With these data and the Highway Development Management Model, minimum travel costs from each location to the market are computed. Consistent with the theory, analysis finds that transportation costs are critical in determining technology choices, with a greater responsiveness among farmers who adopt modern technologies, and at times a perverse (negative) response to lower transport costs among those who employ more traditional techniques. In sum, the paper presents compelling evidence that the constraints to the adoption of modern technologies and access to markets are interconnected, and so should be targeted jointly. -
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Highways to Success or Byways to Waste: Estimating the Economic Benefits of Roads in Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank; and Agence Française de Développement, 2015-10)Roads are the arteries through which the world’s economies pulse. Roads connect sellers to markets, workers to jobs, students to education, and the sick to hospitals. Yet in much of the developing world—and particularly in Africa—adequate roads are lacking. Accordingly, investment in transportation remains a key strategy for development agencies. Roughly $6.8 billion per year is spent in Sub-Saharan Africa on paving roads, and the World Bank invests more on roads than on education, health, and social services combined. Despite the large sums spent on transportation, there have been no assessments to determine whether these significant investments help or hinder outcomes, and the methodologies for evaluating which road projects to fund or not to fund have been disjointed and unreliable. Highways to Success or Byways to Waste: Estimating the Economic Benefits of Roads in Africa hopes to establish a new methodology for prioritizing funding that can be applied to diverse scenarios, regions, and projects. This book demonstrates how modern econometrics and geospatial techniques can be combined to analyze the latest available geo-referenced datasets at the smallest possible scale to answer some of the most important questions in development. Aimed at researchers from across the spectrum of international development, this book seeks to be a reference guide for all who seek new tools and insights into the many issues, both technical and nontechnical, of this important field. -
Publication
Natural Resources in Latin America and the Caribbean : Beyond Booms and Busts?
(World Bank, 2011)Throughout, the history of the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, natural resource wealth has been critical for its economies. Production of precious metals, sugar, rubber, grains, coffee, copper, and oil have at various periods of history made countries in Latin America-and their colonial powers-some of the most prosperous in the world. In some ways, these commodities may have changed the course of history in the world at large. Latin America produced around 80 percent of the world's silver in the 16th through 19th centuries, fueling the monetary systems of not only Europe, but China and India as well. The dramatic movements in commodity markets since the early 2000s, as well as the recent economic crisis, provide new data to analyze and also underscore the importance of a better understanding of issues related to boom-bust commodity cycles. The current pattern of global recovery has favored LAC so far. Countercyclical policies have supported domestic demand in the larger LAC economies, and external demand from fast-growing emerging markets has boosted exports and terms of trade for LAC's net commodity exporters. Prospects for LAC in the short term look good. Beyond the cyclical rebound, however, the region's major longer-run challenge going forward will be to craft a bold productivity agenda. With LAC coming out of this crisis relatively well positioned, this may well be possible, especially considering that the region's improved macro-financial resiliency gives greater assurance that future gains from growth will not be wiped out by financial crises. In addition, LAC has been making significant strides in the equity agenda and this could help mobilize consensus in favor of a long overdue growth-oriented reform agenda. But it remains to be seen whether the region will be able to seize the opportunity to boost long-run growth, especially considering the large gaps that LAC would need to close in such key areas as saving, human capital accumulation, physical infrastructure, and the ability to adopt and adapt new technologies. -
Publication
Low-Carbon Development : Latin American Responses to Climate Change
(World Bank, 2010)Climate change is already a reality. This is evidenced by the acceleration of global temperature increases, the melting of ice and snow covers, and rising sea levels. Latin America and the Caribbean region (LCR) are not exempt from these trends, as illustrated by the changes in precipitation patterns that are already being reported in the region, as well as by observations of rising temperatures, the rapid melting of Andean tropical glaciers, and an increasing number of extreme weather events. The most important force behind climate change is the rising concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the earth's atmosphere driven mainly by manmade emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases. Because of inertia in the climate system, the planet is likely to continue warming over the twenty-first century, and unless emissions are significantly reduced, this process could accelerate, with potentially very serious consequences for nature and mankind. There is still, however, a high degree of uncertainty regarding the specific drivers, timing, and impact of global climate change, as well as about the costs and efficacy of actions aimed at either mitigating it or dealing with its physical and economic impacts. As a result, it is very hard, at this point, to unambiguously determine economically efficient emission pathways for which the benefits of actions to mitigate climate change will exceed the costs of those actions. Despite these problems and uncertainties, there is increasing evidence suggesting that urgent action is needed in order to alter current emission trends so as to avoid reaching GHG concentration levels that could trigger large and irreversible damages. Negotiations are under way and are scheduled to be concluded in 2012 with a new agreement on a way forward. At the same time, individual countries are also considering how to respond in their own domestic policy to the challenges of climate change. LCR governments and civil society should be well informed about the potential costs and benefits of climate change and their options for decisions that will need to be made over the next decades as well as the global context in which these decisions must be taken. At the same time, the global community needs to be better informed about the unique perspective of the LCR, problems the region will face, potential contributions the region can make to combat global warming, and how to unlock the region's full potential so as to enable it to maximize its contribution while continuing to grow and reduce poverty. This report seeks to help fill both these needs. -
Publication
Reaping Richer Returns: Public Spending Priorities for African Agriculture Productivity Growth
(Washington, DC: World Bank and Agence Francaise de Developpement, 2017-02-21)Enhancing the productivity of agriculture is vital for Sub-Saharan Africa's economic future and is one of the most important tools to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity in the region. How governments elect to spend public resources has significant development impact in this regard. Choosing to catalyze a shift toward more effective, efficient, and climate-resilient public spending in agriculture can accelerate change and unleash growth. Not only does agricultural public spending in Sub-Saharan Africa lag behind other developing regions but its impact is vitiated by subsidy programs and transfers that tend to benefit elites to the detriment of poor people and the agricultural sector itself. Shortcomings in the budgeting processes also reduce spending effectiveness. In light of this scenario, addressing the quality of public spending and the efficiency of resource use becomes even more important than addressing only the level of spending. Improvements in the policy environment, better institutions, and investments in rural public goods positively affect agricultural productivity. These, combined with smarter use of public funds, have helped lay the foundations for agricultural productivity growth around the world, resulting in a wealth of important lessons from which African policy makers and development practitioners can draw. 'Reaping Richer Returns: Public Spending Priorities for African Agriculture Productivity Growth' will be of particular interest to policy makers, development practitioners, and academics. The rigorous analysis presented in this book provides options for reform with a view to boosting the productivity of African agriculture and eventually increasing development impact.