"Feed the Mouth, the Eye Ashamed": Have Food Prices Triggered Social Unrest in Egypt?

Abstract

A monthly panel dataset was used to empirically examine the role of food prices in the emergence of social unrest in various geographic regions of Egypt between 1998 and 2013. A media discourse analysis traced reports in two leading Egyptian newspapers about social unrest, overall dissatisfaction with the government, and food price inflation. A fixed effects binary logit panel model has found that the probability of social unrest is statistically related to macroeconomic control variables such as domestic and global food prices, and GDP per capita. Higher temperatures were associated with an increased likelihood of social unrest through their influences on food production and yields, and price volatility in domestic food markets. In addition, the results support to the hypothesis that social unrest in developing countries has a strong "spatial" dimension, where urban dwellers were found to have a greater capacity to engage in collective action leading to social unrest. Finally, media reports about food price inflation were also statistically related to the occurrence of social unrest; but the estimated effect of overall dissatisfaction with institutional quality is even higher. Overall, the results suggest that soaring food prices, despite significant, were unlikely the single most important reason for social unrest in Egypt