International Food Policy Research Institute

About: International Food Policy Research Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Food security & Agriculture. The organization has 1217 authors who have published 4952 publications receiving 218436 citations.

A suite of global accessibility indicators.

Abstract: Good access to resources and opportunities is essential for sustainable development. Improving access, especially in rural areas, requires useful measures of current access to the locations where these resources and opportunities are found. Recent work has developed a global map of travel times to cities with more than 50,000 people in the year 2015. However, the provision of resources and opportunities will differ across the broad spectrum of settlements that range from small towns to megacities, and access to this spectrum of settlement sizes should also be measured. Here we present a suite of nine global travel-time accessibility indicators for the year 2015, at approximately one-kilometre spatial resolution, for a range of settlement size classes. We validated the travel-time estimates against journey times from a Google driving directions application across 1,511 2° × 2° tiles representing 47,812 journeys. We observed very good agreement, though our estimates were more frequently shorter than those from the Google application with a median difference of −13.7 minutes and a median percentage difference of −16.9%. Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9995957

Beyond the Uruguay Round: The Implications of an Asian Free Trade Area

Abstract: The Pacific Rim members of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group have different views about the role each should play in fostering further trade liberalization. But at the November 1994 APEC meetings in Bogor they committed themselves to forming an APEC free trade area. The authors explore: 1) the impact of such a free trade area on trade, welfare, and economic structure of the Pacific Rim economies and the European Union; 2) the implications of forming a partial free trade area, excluding such potential partners as China, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economies, or the United States; 3) whether an APEC free trade area provides more benefits than full trade liberalization that includes the European Union. They analyze these issues using a multicountry, computable general equilibrium model to simulate alternative liberalized trade scenarios. Their findings are as follows. Under the base-case scenario (in which all tariff and most nontariff barriers are removed among the APEC countries, China, Japan, ASEAN, the Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs), and the United States): all APEC countries gain in GDP and the excluded European Union loses sligthly. Gains are greatest for the poorer countries, for whom trade externalities are more significant. Trade expands greatly, and although there is some trade diversion away from the European Union and the rest of the world, that is swamped by the creation of trade within the free trade area. The U.S.-Japan trade balance improves only slightly (by $1.4 billion), and the U.S.-China balance are much larger, suggesting that changes in sectoral protection make movements in particular bilateral trade balances nearly impossible to predict. When one economy is excluded: there are gains from making the free trade area as broad as possible. Omitting any one region (China, the United States, or the ASEAN 4) makes that region significantly worse off and lowers the gains for all other members as well. The Asian NIEs have the most to gain from broad membership. Excluding China reduces Asian NIE gains by about half, and excluding the United States yields even greater declines. Excluding the United States has the worst impact on all other potential members, greater than the effect of omitting China or the ASEAN 4. The European Union is largely unaffected by different versions of the APEC free trade area. Global (versus regional) liberalization: global liberalization that includes the European Union is the best outcome in terms of world GDP and welfare. And all countries gain more from global liberalization than they do from joining an APEC free trade area alone. Forming a regional free trade area may be politically easier than continued global liberalization, but there are economic incentives for all parties to expand on the completed GATT round.

The Impact of Livestock and Fisheries on Food Availability and Demand in 2020

Abstract: People in developed countries consume about 3 to 4 times as much meat and fish, and 5 to 6 times as much milk products per capita as in developing Asia and Africa. Yet, meat, milk, and fish consumption per capita has barely grown in the developed countries as a whole over the past 20 years. Growth in per capita consumption and production has occurred in developing regions such as developing Asia, where income has increased from a low level and urbanization is rapid. By 2020, according to projections by IFPRI's IMPACT model, the share of the developing countries in total world meat consumption will rise from 47 percent currently to 64 percent. The net impact on food access for the poor of the world will depend on their role as producers of meat, milk, and fish, their role as consumers, and their need for protein. The amount of cereals per capita consumed directly by rural people will decline as they diversify their diets into animal proteins, but feed use will increase greatly. Available evidence suggests that on balance poor consumers in developing countries will probably be better off.

The potential cost of a failed Doha Round

Abstract: This study presents scenarios where countries decide to increase current tariff rates to protect domestic industries or raise revenues in order to finance domestic programs. Using the highest applied or bound rate imposed by countries during the period from 1995–2008 as an indicator, it offers new conclusions on the economic cost of a failed Doha Round. In a scenario where applied tariffs of major economies would go up all the way to currently bound tariff rates, world trade would decrease by 7.7 percent. In a more modest scenario where countries would raise tariffs to maximum rates applied over the past 13 years, world trade would decrease by 3.2 percent. These increases in duties would reduce world welfare by USD353 billion under the first scenario, by USD134 billion under the more modest scenario. This study concludes there would be a potential loss of at least USD1,064 billion in world trade if world leaders were to fail to conclude the Doha Development Round of trade negotiations in the next few weeks and were to implement subsequently protectionist policies such as observed since the end of the Uruguay Round. Another point of view is to consider the WTO agreement as an insurance scheme against potential trade wars. So we compare a resort to protectionism when the DDA is implemented with a resort to protectionism when the DDA is not implemented. The findings show that this trade agreement could prevent the potential loss of US$ 809 bn of trade and, therefore, acts as an efficient multilateral insurance scheme against the adverse consequences of trade “beggar-thy-neighbour” policies.