TY - JOUR AU - Anderson, Kym AU - Ivanic, Maros AU - Martin, Will TI - Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation and Poverty JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19530 PY - 2013 Y2 - October 2013 DO - 10.3386/w19530 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19530 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19530.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Kym Anderson University of Adelaide School of Economics Adelaide SA 5005 Australia Tel: 6188303-4712 Fax: 6188223-1460 E-Mail: kym.anderson@adelaide.edu.au Maros Ivanic World Bank, MSN MC3-303 World Bank 1818 H St NW Washington DC 20433 E-Mail: mivanic@worldbank.org Will Martin International Food Policy Research Institute 1201 I St NW Washington, DC 20005 Tel: 202-862 5628 E-Mail: W.Martin@cgiar.org M1 - published as Kym Anderson, Maros Ivanic, William J. Martin. "Food Price Spikes, Price Insulation, and Poverty," in Jean-Paul Chavas, David Hummels, and Brian D. Wright, editors, "The Economics of Food Price Volatility" University of Chicago Press (2014) M3 - presented at "The Economics of Food Price Volatility Conference", August 15-16, 2012 AB - This paper first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes--reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints--were meant to partially insulate domestic markets from the spike in international prices. The authors find that this insulation added substantially to the spike in international prices for rice, wheat, maize, and oilseeds. As a result, although domestic prices rose less than they would have without insulation in some developing countries, in many other countries they rose more than they would have in the absence of such insulation. The paper's second purpose it to estimate the combined impact of such insulating behavior on poverty in various developing countries and globally. The analysis finds that the actual poverty-reducing impact of insulation is much less than its apparent impact, and that its net effect was to increase global poverty in 2008 by 8 million people, although this increase was not significantly different from zero. The paper examines the relative efficiency and equity of trade restrictions and domestic policies, such as conditional cash transfers, than are designed to provide social protection for the poor when international food prices spike. It also examines the potential consequences of multilateral agreements to limit changes in restrictions on trade during such times. ER -