Publication: Can Drought Increase Total Calorie Availability? The Impact of Drought on Food Consumption and the Mitigating Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program
Abstract
This study uses the panel data of a randomized experiment from the Mexican PROGRESA program to evaluate the impact of drought on total calorie availability and the mitigating effects of PROGRESA on food consumption in periods of drought. Drought reduced total expenditures and total food expenditures but increased the total availability of calories. This paradox can be explained by the impact of drought on the composition of calories; that is, it reduced the consumption of expensive calories in such foods as vegetables, fruits, and animal products but increased calories consumed from cheaper sources, such as grains. This study finds that PROGRESA can completely mitigate the negative effects of drought on calorie availability from vegetables, fruits, and other sources. However, PROGRESA cannot mitigate the impact of drought on calories available from grains. The analysis also shows that, during drought, households who increase their consumption of grains get them mainly from purchased sources rather than from home production. In these circumstances, decreased total expenditures and increased purchases of grains suggest that grains are inferior goods in rural Mexico. The Engel curve analysis further proves that grains are inferior goods.
Link to Data Set
Digital Object Identifier
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication The Impact of the Food Price Crisis on Consumption and Caloric Availability in Pakistan : Evidence from Repeated Cross-sectional and Panel Data(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2011-11)Welfare losses from the 2008 food price crisis in Pakistan are deepening the gap between poor and non poor populations and further increasing inequality between the provinces. To estimate welfare losses, the reduction in caloric availability at household level is measured. The analysis of calorie intake by source supports the notion that rural households were shielded from the worst effects of the crisis by their capacity to grow their own food. Compensating variation estimates suggest that the average household would need 38 percent of its total precrisis expenditure to maintain precrisis consumption levels. The impact of the food price crisis (measured as the percentage of total expenditure required to restore consumption to the precrisis level) peaked at the end of 2008 to twice as high as at the start of the year. Average household caloric availability fell by almost 8 percent between 2006 and first half of 2008. Urban households were relatively worse off than rural households during the crisis. Income gains from sales of agricultural commodities produced by rural households presumably offset the negative impact of the food crisis to some degree. The drawdown of assets over 2008-10 was another important coping mechanism, especially for households without access to land.Publication Examining Conditional Cash Transfer Programs : A Role for Increased Social Inclusion?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-06)Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) provide money to poor families contingent upon certain verifiable actions, generally minimum investments in children s human capital such as regular school attendance or basic preventative health care. They therefore hold promise for addressing the inter-generational transmission of poverty and fostering social inclusion by explicitly targeting the poor, focusing on children, delivering transfers to women, and changing social accountability relationships between beneficiaries, service providers and governments. CCT programs are at the forefront of applying new social policy theories and program administration practices. They address demand-side barriers, have a synergistic focus on investments in health, education and nutrition, and combine short-term transfers for income support with incentives for long-run investments in human capital. They also are public sector leaders in program administration, using modern targeting, registering, and monitoring systems along with strategic evaluations. Their impact depends on the supply of quality, accessible health and education services and may increase with strengthened links to the labor market, and a greater focus on early childhood and transient support to households facing shocks. CCT programs are facing a number of challenges as they evolve, from reaching vulnerable groups to fostering transparency and accountability, especially at the community level. Centralized programs have been criticized for limiting the engagement of local governments and civil society and it is clear that in limited capacity environments, a greater reliance on communities is warranted. In sum, though promising, these programs are not a panacea against social exclusion and should form part of comprehensive social and economic policy strategies and be applied carefully in different policy contexts.Publication Own and sibling effects of conditional cash transfer programs : theory and evidence from Cambodia(2009-07-01)Conditional cash transfers have been adopted by a large number of countries in the past decade. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. This paper uses evidence from a program in Cambodia, where eligibility varied substantially among siblings in the same household, to illustrate these effects. A model of schooling decisions highlights three different effects of a child-specific conditional cash transfer: an income effect, a substitution effect, and a displacement effect. The model predicts that such a conditional cash transfer will increase enrollment for eligible children - due to all three effects - but have an ambiguous effect on ineligible siblings. The ambiguity arises from the interaction of a positive income effect with a negative displacement effect. These predictions are shown to be consistent with evidence from Cambodia, where the child-specific program makes modest transfers, conditional on school enrollment for children of middle-school age. Scholarship recipients were more than 20 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school and 10 percentage points less likely to work for pay. However, the school enrollment and work of ineligible siblings was largely unaffected by the program.Publication Migration, Transfers and Economic Decision Making among Agricultural Households: An Introduction(2010)The increasing volume of remittances and public transfers in rural areas of the developing world has raised hopes that these inflows may serve as an effective mechanism for reducing poverty in the long term by facilitating investments and raising productivity, particularly in agriculture where market failures are most manifest. The seven papers in this special issue systematically test the relationship between transfers and productive spending amongst rural households in six different countries. Overall, the studies embrace a less optimistic view of the role of migration and public and private transfers on agriculture, with migration as facilitating a transition away from agriculture or to models of less labour intensive agriculture.Publication Conditional Cash Transfers and Female Schooling : The Impact of the Female School Stipend Programme on Public School Enrolments in Punjab, Pakistan(2010)Instead of mean-tested Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes, some countries have implemented gender-targeted CCTs to explicitly address intra-household disparities in human capital investments. This study focuses on addressing the direct impact of a female school stipend programme in Punjab, Pakistan--Did the intervention increase female enrolment in public schools? To address this question, we draw upon data from the provincial school censuses 2003 and 2005. We estimate the net growth in female enrolments in grade 6-8 in stipend eligible schools. Impact evaluation analysis, including difference-and-difference (DD), triple differencing (DDD) and regression-discontinuity design (RDD), indicate a modest but statistically significant impact of the intervention. The preferred estimator derived from a combination of DDD and RDD empirical strategies suggests that the average programme impact between 2003 and 2005 was an increase of six female students per school in terms of absolute change and an increase of 9% in female enrolment in terms of relative change. A triangulation effort is also undertaken using two rounds of a nationally representative household survey before and after the intervention. Even though the surveys are not representative at the sub-provincial level, the results corroborate evidence of the impact using school census data.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
No results found.