Steven Block

Many policies and programs aim to bring nutritious diets within reach of the poor. This paper uses retail prices and nutrient composition for 744 widely-consumed food and beverage items to compute the daily cost of meeting nutrient requirements for an active and healthy life, for comparison with the subsistence cost of dietary energy, measurement of affordability relative to per-capita earnings, and analysis of stylized facts about how cost and affordability relates to nutrition outcomes and economic development around the world. We find that the minimum cost of adequate nutrition exceeds the minimum cost of adequate energy intake by a factor of 2.5-3.8, with substantial variation both across and within national income groups. Relative to average household expenditures, adequate nutrition is the least affordable in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the most affordable in North America. In absolute terms, the minimum cost of adequate nutrition in many poor countries exceeds the global $1.90/day poverty line. Costs are lower in higher-income countries, which we explain as a function of infrastructure and the efficiency of agricultural marketing and retail food systems.

In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many African states replaced authoritarian political regimes with competitive electoral systems; the economies of many also began to grow, some for the first time in decades. We argue that democratic reform led to economic growth, as did Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo and Robinson in an earlier paper. Our approach differs from theirs in that while we to seek to identify a causal relationship between democracy and development, we build our analysis around the qualitative accounts of regional specialists and the reasoning of political economists. Where others test for the existence of a causal account, we test for the existence of specific casual mechanisms.

In this paper new estimates are presented for the path of TFP growth in African crop agriculture. With adjustment for the quality of inputs TFP growth rates declined from a rate of 1.5% per annum in the early 1960s to less than 0.5% per annum by the late 1970s. Since then the growth rate has risen steadily so by the early 2000s it was close to the levels achieved at the beginning of the period. These results follow from using a novel semi-parametric econometric approach to estimating TFP. Recent advances in panel econometrics are used to show the heterogeneity of TFP growth rates across countries. Expenditures on agricultural R&D, along with the reform of macroeconomic and sectoral policies have played a substantial role in explaining this pattern of TFP growth.

Rice production in Africa has tended to be low-yielding, geographically dispersed, and uncompetitive against low-cost Asian imports, even when protected by high freight costs and substantial trade barriers. Skyrocketing prices in world markets in 2007-08 were a shock to African consumers, producers, and governments alike. When international rice prices were relatively low, rice imports did not pose economic or political problems for West African governments. Extremely expensive imports reverse that equation. This paper addresses the response to that reversal first by presenting a historical review of trends in the West African rice sector and, second, by assessing the effect of world rice prices on domestic prices, primarily at the consumer level.

This paper explores trends in poverty and nutrition during economic transformation and especially the impacts linked to government support for agriculture during the process. Analysis of multiyear data for 29 developing countries confirms that structural transformation raises total income and that poverty falls faster with strong support for agriculture. In turn, poverty reduction supports improved nutrition, especially in rural areas. However, transformation brings problems through health risks associated with rising obesity in rural as well as urban areas. Thus, the transition process must be managed better, through targeted support for smallholder agriculture and health interventions, if the negative consequences of obesity and chronic disease are to be mitigated.

This paper explores the impact of expenditure on smoking products in low-income households on child nutrition, as mediated via reduced food expenditure. On the basis of data from a large household survey in rural Indonesia, the study finds that low-income households containing at least one smoker tend to divert a significant amount of scarce income to tobacco products and that relatively more of the diversion is drawn from food than from nonfood purchases. This results in a real decline in the quantity and quality of food consumed in the poorest households, which is associated with a statistically significant reduction in the nutritional status of children in those households. In other words, parental smoking increases child malnutrition via its displacement effect on food consumption-an intuitive but rarely documented empirical finding. Attention is needed to finding appropriate mechanisms for enhancing food and nutrition in poorest households in tandem with investments in public health information systems that highlight these indirect, as well as direct, links between smoking and child well-being. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..