Do regional trade pacts benefit the poor ? An illustration from the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement in Nicaragua

The main objective of this paper is to provide an ex-ante assessment of the poverty and income distribution impacts of the Central American Free Trade Area agreement on Nicaragua. The authors use a general equilibrium macro model to simulate trade reform scenarios and estimate their price effects, while a micro-module maps these price changes into real income changes at the individual household level. A useful insight from this analysis is that even if the final total impact on poverty is not too large, its dispersion across households-due to their heterogeneity of factor endowments, inputs use, commodity production, and consumption preferences-is significant and should be taken into account when designing compensatory policies. Additionally, growth and redistribution decomposition show that, at least in the short to medium run, redistribution can be as important as growth. The main policy message that emerges from the paper is that Nicaragua should consider enlarging its own liberalization to countries other than the United States to boost trade-induced poverty reductions.Economic Theory&Research,Free Trade,Inequality,Markets and Market Access,Consumption

Challenges to MDG achievement in low income countries : lessons from Ghana and Honduras

This paper summarizes the policy lessons from applications of the Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS) model to two low income countries: Ghana and Honduras. Results show that costs of MDGs achievement could reach 10-13 percent of GDP by 2015, although, given the observed low productivity in the provision of social services, significant savings may be realized by improving efficiency. Sources of financing also matter: foreign aid inflows can reduce international competitiveness through real exchange appreciation, while domestic financing can crowd out the private sector and slow poverty reduction. Spending a large share of a fixed budget on growth-enhancing infrastructure may mean sacrificing some human development, even if higher growth is usually associated with lower costs of social services. The pursuit of MDGs increases demand for skills: while this encourages higher educational attainments, in the short term this could lead to increased income inequality and a lower poverty elasticity of growth.Population Policies,,Achieving Shared Growth,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Public Sector Expenditure Analysis&Management

Remittances and the real exchange rate

Existing empirical evidence indicates that remittances have a positive impact on a good number of development indicators of recipient countries. Yet when flows are too large relative to the size of the recipient economies, as those observed in a number of Latin American countries, they may also bring a number of undesired problems. Among those probably the most feared in this context is the Dutch Disease. This paper explores the empirical evidence regarding the impact of remittances on the real exchange rate. The findings suggest that remittances indeed appear to lead to a significant real exchange rate appreciation. The paper also explores policy options that may somewhat offset the observed effect.Economic Stabilization,Macroeconomic Management,Economic Theory&Research,Remittances,Achieving Shared Growth

Achieving accelerated and shared growth in Ghana : a MAMS-based analysis of costs and opportunities

This paper relies on the recently developed Maquette for Millennium Development Goals Simulations (MAMS) model to assess the consistency of alternative scaling-up and policy packages for growth and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Ghana. In the baseline scenario, Ghana's strong near and medium-term growth outlook puts it in a good position to achieve the poverty Millennium Development Goal ahead of schedule, but other goals are likely to remain elusive before 2015. In the accelerated growth scenario-which addresses the major gaps in water and sanitation and other infrastructure-even more rapid growth and poverty reduction are possible, but important targets in the areas of education, health, and environment remain unattainable. Although growth is complementary to achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, the authors also find important growth-human development trade-offs in the near term. The estimates show that the resource requirements for achieving the key Millennium Development Goals by 2015 are large, reaching US$82 per capita in an illustrative foreign-grant financed scenario. Increased intake and retention of students contribute to rising scarcity of unskilled labor, buttressing unskilled wages, while high demand for skills from the sectors related to the Millennium Development Goals raises the returns to human capital. These developments lead to improvements in the welfare of the poorest members of Ghanaian society and contribute to a small reduction in overall inequality.Population Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,,Public Sector Expenditure Analysis&Management,Economic Theory&Research

Guest Editorial - Macro-micro analytics: background, motivation, advantages and remaining challenges

Guest editorial special issue on CGE and microsimulation

The impact of commodity price changes on rural households : the case of coffee in Uganda

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same period, large international price fluctuations as well as an extensive domestic deregulation affected the coffee sector, its main source of export revenues. Using data from three household surveys covering the 1990s, the authors confirm a strong correlation between changes in coffee prices (in a liberalized market) and poverty reduction. This is highlighted by comparing the performance of different households grouped according to their dependence on coffee farming. Regression analysis (based on pooled data from the three surveys) of consumption expenditure on coffee-related variables, other controls, and time-fixed effects corroborates that the mentioned correlation is not spurious. The authors also find that while both poor and rich farmers enter the coffee sector, the price boom benefits the poorer households relatively more, whereas the liberalization seems to create more opportunities for richer farmers. Finally, notwithstanding the importance of the coffee price boom, the agricultural policy framework and the thorough structural reforms in which the coffee market liberalization was embedded have certainly played a role in triggering overall agricultural growth. These factors appear to matter especially in the second half of the 1990s when prices went down but poverty reduction continued.Crops&Crop Management Systems,Markets and Market Access,Rural Poverty Reduction,Access to Markets

Economic growth and income distribution: linking macro-economic models with household survey data at the global level

This paper describes in detail the analytical structure of the Global Income Distribution Dynamics (GIDD) model, a global macro-micro modelling framework, and provides some examples of its recent applications. GIDD is the first macro-micro global simulation model focused on long-term, global growth and distribution dynamics. GIDD has been applied in analyzing the effects of multilateral trade liberalization or mitigation of climate change damages, among others. It also explicitly considers long term time horizons during which changes in the demographic structure are crucial components of both growth and distribution dynamics. The challenges of assessing plausible worldwide distributional implications of growth, large shocks, and policy changes are daunting. Although addressing these issues in a macro-micro framework is subject to great uncertainty, a clearly superior alternative is not yet available.global income distribution; macro-micro model

Structural change and poverty reduction in Brazil : the impact of the Doha Round

Over the medium time horizon, skill upgrading, differentials in sectoral technological progress, and migration of labor out of farming activities are some of the major structural adjustment factors shaping the evolution of an economy and its connected poverty trends. The main focus of the authors is understanding, for the case of Brazil, how a trade shock interacts with these structural forces and ascertaining whether it enhances or hinders medium-term poverty reduction. In particular, they consider the interactions between the migration of labor out of agriculture, a potentially important poverty reduction factor, and trade liberalization, which increases the price incentives to stay in agriculture. A recursive-dynamic computable general equilibrium model simulates Doha scenarios and compares them against a business as usual scenario. The authors estimate the poverty effects using a microsimulation model that primarily takes into account individuals'labor supply decisions. Their analysis shows that trade liberalization does contribute to structural poverty reduction. But unless increased productivity and stronger growth rates are attributed to trade reform, its contribution to medium-term poverty reduction is rather small.Economic Theory&Research,Labor Markets,Rural Poverty Reduction,Achieving Shared Growth,Rural Development Knowledge&Information Systems

The DR-CAFTA and the extensive margin : a firm-level analysis

This paperexamines the export behavior of Dominican Republic exporters following the implementation of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2007. Using a firm-level dataset for 2002-2009, the authors investigate the effects of a tariff reduction on the extensive margin. The analysis distinguishes the impact on the entry of new firms, exports of new products, and entry into the Agreement’s markets. The paper analyzes whether the agreement prevents incumbent exporters from exiting the market. The results suggest that tariff cuts had a positive although very small effect on the extensive margin. A decline in tariffs also seems to reduce the probability of exit, but the effect is also small. The evidence calls for complementary policies aiming at helping exporters maximize the benefits of the agreement.Free Trade,Markets and Market Access,Debt Markets,Export Competitiveness,Trade Policy

The Impact of Coffee Price Changes on Rural Households in Uganda

Based on household survey data, this paper investigates the impact on coffee and non-coffee households of the pronounced coffee price fluctuations in Uganda during the 1990s. As expected, the price boom of the early 1990s was associated with substantial poverty reduction for coffee farmers. More strikingly, their poverty incidence continued to go down when prices fell again. This may be explained by a combination of factors: first, coffee production increased after 1995, probably as a delayed response to improved price incentives; second, there is evidence of consumption smoothing among specialized coffee farmers; and third, coffee farmers diversified into alternative crops. Non-coffee farmers seem to have benefited from the income generated through the coffee price boom. For the second halve of the 1990s, by contrast, it is impossible to discern any indirect effect of the fall in coffee prices from the data, which does, however, not necessarily indicate that there was none but may as well be due to the fact that other factors dominated the price change.Coffee Price Changes, Price Transmission, Rural Households, Poverty Analysis, Uganda, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis,