Person:
Martin, William John

Agricultural and Rural Development Unit, Development Research Group, The World Bank

Fields of Specialization

Agricultural economics; agricultural trade; poverty; food prices; WTO

ORCID

0000-0002-2824-1303

External Links

EconPapers
Google Scholar

Departments

Agricultural and Rural Development Unit, Development Research Group, The World Bank

Last updated: January 31, 2023

Biography

Will Martin is Manager for Agricultural and Rural Development in the World Bank’s Research Group and President-Elect of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. His recent research has focused primarily on the impacts of changes in food and trade policies and food prices on poverty and food security in developing countries. His research has also examined the impact of major trade policy reforms—including the Uruguay Round; the Doha Development Agenda; and China’s accession to the WTO—on developing countries; implications of climate change for poor people; and implications of improvements in agricultural productivity in developing countries. He trained in economics and agricultural economics at the University of Queensland, the Australian National University and Iowa State University and worked at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Economics and the Australian National University before joining the World Bank in 1991.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 80

Repurposing Agricultural Policies and Support: Options to Transform Agriculture and Food Systems to Better Serve the Health of People, Economies, and the Planet
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-01-24) Laborde, David; Gautam, Madhur; Mamun, Abdullah; Pineiro, Valeria; Martin, Will; Vos, Rob
The report finds that repurposing a portion of government spending on agriculture each year to develop and disseminate more emission-efficient technologies for crops and livestock could reduce overall emissions from agriculture by more than 40 percent. Meanwhile, millions of hectares of land could be restored to natural habitats. The economic payoffs to this type of repurposing would be large. Redirecting about $70 billion a year, equivalent to one percent of global agricultural output, would yield a net benefit of over $2 trillion in 20 years.
Making Gravity Great Again
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09) Martin, Will
The gravity model is now widely used for policy analysis and hypothesis testing, but different estimators give sharply different parameter estimates and popular estimators are likely biased because dependent variables are limited-dependent, error variances are nonconstant and missing data frequently reported as zeros. Monte Carlo analysis based on real-world parameters for aggregate trade shows that the traditional Ordinary Least Squares estimator in logarithms is strongly biased downwards. The popular Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood model also suffers from downward bias. An Eaton-Kortum maximum-likelihood approach dealing with the identified sources of bias provides unbiased parameter estimates.
Modeling the Impacts of Agricultural Support Policies on Emissions from Agriculture
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-08) Laborde, David; Mamun, Abdullah; Martin, Will; Pineiro, Valeria; Vos, Rob
To understand the impacts of support programs on global emissions, this paper considers the impacts of domestic subsidies, price distortions at the border, and investments in emission-reducing technologies on global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture. It uses a counterfactual global model scenario showing how much emissions from agricultural production would change if agricultural support were abolished worldwide. The analysis indicates that, without subsidies paid directly to farmers, output of emission-intensive activities and emissions would be smaller. Without trade protection, however, emissions would be higher. This is because protection reduces global demand more than it increases supply, and partly because some countries that currently tax agriculture have high emission intensities. Policies that directly reduce emission intensities yield much larger reductions in emissions than those targeting overall productivity growth to reduce emissions because of the rebound effect. Scenario analysis to understand the impacts of repurposed agricultural policy and support measures on mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation to climate change is being undertaken in subsequent work, which will also take account of land-use change and alternative forms of agricultural support to align objectives of food security, farmers’ income security, production efficiency and resilience, and environmental protection.
Economic Growth, Convergence, and World Food Demand and Supply
(Elsevier, 2020-08) Fukase, Emiko; Martin, Will
In recent years, developing countries have been growing much more rapidly than the industrial countries. This growth convergence has potentially very important implications for world food demand and for world agriculture because of the increase in demand for agricultural resources as diets shift away from starchy staples and towards animal-based products and fruits and vegetables. Using a resource-based measure of food production and consumption that accounts for the much higher production costs associated with animal-based foods, this article finds per capita demand growth to be a more important driver of food demand than population growth between now and 2050. Using the middle-ground Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenario to 2050 from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, which assumes continued income convergence, the article finds that the increase in food demand (102 percent) would be about a third greater than under a hypothetical scenario of all countries growing at the same rate (78 percent). As convergence increases the growth of food supply by less than demand, it appears to be a driver of upward pressure on world food prices.
Taking Another Look at Policy Research on China's Accession to the World Trade Organization
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-07) Ianchovichina, Elena; Martin, Will
Recent work on China's accession to the World Trade Organizations pays little attention to the wave of reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms created the preconditions for accession and strongly influenced its outcomes. The preeminence of processing trade at the time of accession sharply reduced the impact of accession-related tariff reductions on exports and set the stage for China's increases in domestic value added and reduction in China's involvement in global production sharing since that time. The assessment in this paper, based on export data and simulation results on the ex ante accession-related effects on export volumes in the literature, finds that the accession must have increased China's real export growth by at most 6 percentage points between 1997 and 2005. This effect is substantial, but not as large as suggested by the difference between the pre- and post-accession export growth rates in the four years before and after accession. This is because the influence of cyclical fluctuations related to the Asian financial crisis and the U.S. dot-com crash dampened export growth in the period before accession in 2001 and accelerated it afterward.
Poverty Impact of Food Price Shocks and Policies
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02) Laborde, David; Lakatos, Csilla; Martin, Will
In the event of large swings in world food prices, countries often intervene to dampen the impact of international food price spikes on domestic prices and to lessen the burden of adjustment on vulnerable population groups. While individual countries can succeed at insulating their domestic markets from short-term fluctuations in global food prices, the collective intervention of many countries may exacerbate the volatility of world prices. Insulating policies introduced during the 2010-11 food price spike may have accounted for 40 percent of the increase in the world price of wheat and one-quarter of the increase in the world price of maize. Combined with government policy responses, the 2010-11 food price spike tipped 8.3 million people (nearly 1 percent of the world's poor) into poverty.
Economic Growth, Convergence, and World Food Demand and Supply
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-11) Fukase, Emiko; Martin, Will
In projecting global food demand to 2050, much attention has been given to rising demand due to the projected population increase from the current 7.4 billion to more than 9 billion. An increasingly important source of the increase in food demand is per capita demand growth induced by rising income per person. Since the proportion of income spending on food decreases as incomes rise, growth in global food demand will be greater if incomes grow faster in developing countries than in high-income countries. Such a pattern of income convergence has become established in recent years, making it important to assess the implications for food demand and supply. Using a resource-based measure of food that accounts for the much higher production costs associated with dietary upgrading, this paper concludes that per capita demand growth is likely to be a more important driver of food demand than population growth between now and 2050. Using the middle-ground International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis Shared Socioeconomic Pathway projections to 2050, which assume continued income convergence, the paper finds that the increase in food demand (102 percent) would be roughly a third greater than without convergence (78 percent). Since the impact of convergence on the supply side is much more muted, convergence puts upward pressure on world food prices, partially offsetting a baseline trend toward falling world food prices to 2050.
Managing Food Price Volatility in a Large Open Country: The Case of Wheat in India
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02) Gouel, Christophe; Gautam, Madhur; Martin, William J.; `Martin, Will J.
India has pursued an active food security policy for many years, using a combination of trade policy interventions, public distribution of food staples, and assistance to farmers through minimum support prices defended by public stocks. This policy has been quite successful in stabilizing staple food prices, but at a high cost, and with potential risks of unmanageable stock accumulation. Based on a rational expectations storage model representing the Indian wheat market and its relation to the rest of the world, this paper analyzes the cost and welfare implications of this policy and unpacks the contribution of its different elements. To analyze alternative policies, social welfare is assumed to include an objective of price stabilization and optimal policies corresponding to this objective are assessed. Considering fully optimal policies under commitment as well as optimal simple rules, it is shown that adopting simple rules can achieve most of the gains from fully optimal policies, with both potentially allowing for lower stockholding levels and costs.
Estimating the Gravity Model When Zero Trade Flows are Frequent and Economically Determined
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06) Pham, Cong S.; Martin, Will
This paper evaluates the performance of alternative estimators of the gravity equation when zero trade flows result from economically-based data-generating processes with heteroscedastic residuals and potentially-omitted variables. In a standard Monte Carlo analysis, the paper finds that this combination can create seriously biased estimates in gravity models with frequencies of zero frequently observed in real-world data, and that Poisson Pseudo-Maximum-Likelihood models can be important in solving this problem. Standard threshold–Tobit estimators perform well in a Tobit-based data-generating process only if the analysis deals with the heteroscedasticity problem. When the data are generated by a Heckman sample selection model, the Zero-Inflated Poisson model appears to have the lowest bias. When the data are generated by a Helpman, Melitz, and Rubinstein-type model with heterogeneous firms, a Zero-Inflated Poisson estimator including firm numbers appears to provide the best results. Testing on real-world data for total trade throws up additional puzzles with truncated Poisson Pseudo-Maximum-Likelihood and Poisson Pseudo-Maximum-Likelihood estimators being very similar, and Zero-Inflated Poisson and truncated Poisson Pseudo-Maximum-Likelihood identical. Repeating the Monte Carlo analysis taking into account the high frequency of very small predicted trade flows in real-world data reconciles these findings and leads to specific recommendations for estimators.
Formulas for Failure?: Were the Doha Tariff Formulas Too Ambitious for Success?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06) Laborde, David; Martin, Will
This paper views tariff-cutting formulas as a potential solution to the free-rider problem that arises when market opening is negotiated bilaterally and extended on a most-favored-nation basis. The negotiators in the Doha Agenda chose formulas that are ideal from an economic efficiency viewpoint in that they most sharply reduce the highest and most economically-costly tariffs. When the political support that gave rise to the original tariffs is considered, however, this approach appears to generate very high political costs per unit of gain in economic efficiency. The political costs associated with the formulas appear to have led to strong pressure for many, complex exceptions, which both lowered and increased uncertainty about members’ market access gains. Where tariff cuts focus on applied rates, it seems likely that a proportional cut rule would reduce the political costs of securing agreements. However, detailed examination of the Doha proposals with their product exceptions suggests that negotiators are likely to find cuts with exceptions politically attractive but economically costly when cuts are based on bound tariffs with different degrees of binding overhang.