Biblioteca Digital

Household surveys in Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka were analyzed using a two-stage Heckman model to examine the factors influencing the decision to use liquefied petroleum gas (stage 1) and, among users, the quantity consumed per person (stage 2). In the first stage, liquefied petroleum gas selection in all six countries increased with household expenditure and the highest level of education attained by female and male household members. Electricity connection increased, and engagement in agriculture and increasing household size decreased, liquefied petroleum gas selection in five countries; urban residence increased selection in four countries; and rising firewood and kerosene prices increased selection in three countries each. In the second stage, the quantity of liquefied petroleum gas consumed increased with rising household expenditure and decreasing price of liquefied petroleum gas in every country. Urban residence increased and engagement in agriculture decreased liquefied petroleum gas consumption. Surveys in Albania...

This paper studies the volatility of commodity prices on the basis of a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more volatile than those of manufactured products, although most of the existing evidence does not actually attempt to measure the volatility of prices of individual goods or commodities. The literature tends to focus on trends in the evolution and volatility of ratios of price indexes composed of multiple commodities and products. This approach can be misleading. Indeed, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that on average prices of individual primary commodities are less volatile than those of individual manufactured goods. However, the challenges of managing terms of trade volatility in developing countries with concentrated export baskets remain.

Over the past two decades, globalization, and more specifically the increased exposure to competition from low-price producers in China and India, has created a new economic environment for other emerging economies. The most advantageous way for manufacturing firms in those economies to position themselves in domestic and international markets is to offer upgraded and differentiated rather than "mundane" labor-intensive products. This paper investigates whether increased competitive pressure from imports forces firms to improve the quality of their products. The econometric analysis relies on a rich dataset of Chilean manufacturing plants and their products. Product quality is measured with unit values (average prices) and industry-level transport costs are used as an exogenous measure of import competition. The authors find a positive and robust effect of import competition on product quality. This effect is found to be particularly strong for non-exporting plants. The results also show that increased import competition from less advanced economies is the major cause for the positive impact on quality upgrading. The overall evidence points to the benefits of trade openness for product innovation but demonstrates at the same time that competitive pressure alone will not enable local plants to catch up with leading world producers.

In many poor countries, the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food, many of whom are relatively poor, while hurting net food consumers, many of whom are also relatively poor. The impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse, but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects, and can only be determined by looking at real-world data. Results using household data for ten observations on nine low-income countries show that the short-run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country, but, that poverty increases are much more frequent, and larger, than poverty reductions. The recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially.

Crude oil prices have dramatically increased over the past years and are now at a historical maximum in nominal terms and very close to it in real terms. It is difficult to argue, at least for net oil importers, that higher oil prices have a positive impact on welfare. In fact, the negative relationship between oil prices and economic activity has been well documented in the literature. Yet, to the extent that higher oil prices lead to lower oil consumption, it would be possible to argue that not all the effects of a price increase are negative. Climate change concerns have been on the rise in recent years and fossil fuel consumption is generally viewed as one of the main causes behind it. Thus this paper explores whether higher oil prices contribute to lowering oil intensities (that is, oil consumption per unit of gross domestic product). The findings show that following an increase in oil prices, OECD countries tend to reduce oil intensity. However, the same result does not hold for Latin America (and more generally for middle-income countries) where oil intensities appear to be unaffected by oil prices. The paper also explores why this is so.

The enforcement of stringent intellectual property rights in the pharmaceutical sector of developing countries generates considerable controversy, due to both the extensive research investment and the public policy importance of this sector. This paper explores the likely effects of enforcing product patents on prices and utilization of drugs in the Central Nervous System market in India. The Central Nervous System segment is the second largest therapeutic category in terms of retail sales in the world and is one of the fastest growing segments in India. Using information on product patents granted by the government and panel data on pharmaceutical prices and utilization from 2003-2008, the paper finds limited evidence of overall price increase following the introduction of product patents. However, there appear to be heterogeneous effects on prices by the type of product patent granted on drugs, implying the need for a careful examination of the product patent portfolio.

Many developing countries are becoming oil exporters, producing crude oils that often differ markedly in quality from those principally traded. Governments must predict the prices of such crudes, to forecast revenue and evaluate the fairness of the price they receive from companies selling on their behalf. Oil companies, and industry consultants, have models for analyzing price differentials with well-known "marker" crudes, but these models have not been widely known, or adapted to account for increasingly important quality characteristics, such as acidity. This note explains a methodology for price analysis, and a new extension for incorporating acidity, which can have a big effect on the price differential.

Between 1999 and 2008, world oil prices more than quadrupled in real terms. For oil importers, vulnerability to oil price increases, defined as the share of gross domestic product spent on net oil imports, rose considerably. Considering medians, low-income countries had the highest vulnerability in 2008 and the highest increase in vulnerability between 1999 and 2008. When changes in vulnerability were decomposed into several contributing factors, more than two-thirds of 170 countries studied were found to have offset the increase in the value of oil consumption by reducing the oil intensity of gross domestic product. Oil intensity fell in more than half the countries in every income group and in every region of the world, driven by falling energy intensity and, to a lesser extent, the oil share of energy. This study also examines the degree of pass-through to consumers of increases in world prices of gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and liquefied petroleum gas between January 2009 and January 2012, when oil prices in nominal U.S. dollars more than doubled. Retail fuel prices varied by two orders of magnitude in 2012...

Following the world food price spike in 2008 and again in 2011, there has been increased attention on better understanding the drivers of food prices, their impacts on the poor, and policy response options. This paper provides a simple model that closely simulates actual historical food price behavior around which the analysis of the drivers of food price levels, volatility, and the associated response options is derived. Future food prices are likely to remain higher than pre-2007 levels and recent price uncertainty is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Accelerated use of food crops for industrial purposes (biofuels) continues to offset the slowing population growth effect on food demand. World food stocks remain at relatively low levels where the likelihood of price spikes is higher. Production gains may be harder to achieve in the future than in the past, with more limited space for area expansion, declining yield growth, and increases in weather variability. Suggested responses to reduce average food price levels are to (i) raise food crop yields...

This paper evaluates the impact of coffee sector reforms during late 1980s and early 1990s on coffee growers in the main coffee producing countries. Earlier evidence suggests that the reforms increased the share of producer prices in the world price of coffee. This hypothesis is tested in the paper with the help of cointegration analysis, and the results show that in most countries the longterm producer price share has indeed increased substantially after the liberalization. Moreover, the results suggest that the reforms induced a closer cointegrating relationship between grower prices and world market prices. Finally, estimation of an error-correction model reveals that short-run transmission of price signals from the world market to domestic producers has improved, such that domestic prices adjust faster today to world price fluctuations than they did prior to the reforms. However, there is some evidence of asymmetries in the way positive and negative world price changes are transmitted to domestic markets.

Researchers often use unit values (household expenditures on a commodity divided by the quantity purchased) as proxies for market prices when calculating poverty lines and estimating consumer demand equations. Such proxies are often needed because community price surveys in developing economies are either absent or suffer quality problems. However, using unit values may result in biases due to measurement error and quality effects. In a household survey experiment, information on prices was obtained in three ways: from unit values, from a market price survey, and from the opinions of householders who were shown pictures of items and asked to report the local price. The three sets of price data are used to calculate poverty lines, estimate price elasticities, and analyze marginal tax reforms. There are substantial biases when unit values are used as a proxy for market price, even when sophisticated correction methods are applied. Performance was better for the price opinions of household members. The results highlight the importance of price collection methods and the need to consider the wider costs of having potentially unreliable community-level price data.

This paper presents retail prices of the petroleum products in August 2008 in up to 56 countries, and examines the degree of pass through to consumers of increases in world gasoline and diesel prices since January 2004 in 48 countries. This is the second paper in a series summarizing work undertaken to assess the implications of higher oil prices on fuel use, the downstream petroleum sector, and household fuel consumption in the developing world. It follows a recent publication on a decomposition analysis of vulnerability to oil price increases, where vulnerability is defined as the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on net imports of crude oil and petroleum products (Bacon and Kojima 2008). This paper focuses on the extent to which international petroleum product price increases have been passed on to consumers.

This paper examines the extent to which the destination of exports matters for the input prices paid by firms, using detailed customs and firm-product-level data from Portugal. The authors use exchange rate movements as a source of variation in export destinations and find that exporting to richer countries leads firms to charge more for outputs and pay higher prices for inputs, other things equal. The results are supportive of the hypothesis that an exogenous increase in average destination income leads firms to raise the average quality of goods they produce and to purchase higher-quality inputs.

Myanmar is a low-income agrarian country with a high poverty rate. The livelihood of many poor people depends on the performance of agriculture, especially the rice sector. Rice accounts for 70 percent of Myanmar s total cultivated area and 30 percent of the value of its agricultural production. Increasing returns to rice production will be the key to increasing farm wages and incomes in the short to medium run. Higher rice production will also help maintain low food prices, improve food security, and reduce poverty, as an average household spends 61 percent of total household income on food, and rice is a major component of the food basket. Price fluctuations are a common feature of well-functioning agricultural markets. Price fluctuation should be expected in such markets, since output varies from period to period due to factors such as weather, pests and disease, and because demand and supply are inelastic in the short run. Moreover, some amount of seasonal and spatial price movements should be tolerated, since these usefully signal scarcity in the market and facilitate a supply response...

This paper investigates the link between competitive, well-functioning food markets and consumer welfare. The paper explores two key food markets in Kenya -- sugar and maize -- and argues that a variety of factors conspire to distort market prices upward. Distortionary factors include import tariff policy, nontariff barriers, potential anticompetitive conduct by firms, and direct state intervention in markets. Changes in sugar and maize prices are shown to have significant welfare effects on consumers. Equivalent income effects are estimated using the most recent available representative household survey data -- the Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey 2005/06. The paper shows that relaxing trade barriers to allow sugar prices to fall by 20 percent could reduce poverty by 1.5 percent. Similarly, adjusting government interventions in the maize market, which have been shown to inflate maize prices by 20 percent on average, could reduce poverty by 1.8 percent. The magnitude of the estimated income effects may vary based on updated household-level consumption data...

This paper investigates the impact of increases in wheat flour prices on household food security using unique nationally-representative data collected in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008. It uses a new estimator, the Unconditional Quantile Regression estimator, based on influence functions, to examine the marginal effects of price increases at different locations on the distributions of several food security measures. The estimates reveal that the negative marginal effect of a price increase on food consumption is two and a half times larger for households that can afford to cut the value of food consumption (75th quantile) than for households at the bottom (25th quantile) of the food-consumption distribution. Similarly, households with diets high in calories reduce intake substantially, but those at the bottom of the calorie distribution (25th quantile) make very small changes in intake as a result of the price increases. In contrast, households at the bottom of the dietary diversity distribution make the largest adjustments in the quality of their diets...

In Central America, like many other developing regions, high transport costs are cited as an important impediment to trade and economic growth. Prices for road freight transport, a key mode of transport comprising a significant share of total transport costs for both intra, and extra, regional trade, are particularly high. Averaging 17 US cents per ton-kilometer on main trading routes, these rates stand out even relative to other inefficient developing country markets (e.g., central and west Africa). However, the policy and other factors associated with increased prices have not been well understood. Using data from a survey of trucking companies operating on the region's main trade corridors, this paper analyzes the primary drivers affecting firms' cost of providing service, as well as the effect of market structure and competition on markups and prices. We find that whereas improved cost efficiencies could reduce prices by 3 cents per ton?kilometer, increased competition on national routes, those entirely within a nation's borders...

The objective of the study is to examine, identify, and quantify the factors behind Africa's high prices for road transport. Such prices are a major obstacle to economic growth in the region, as shown in several studies. For example, Amjadi and Yeats (1995) concluded that transport costs in Africa were a higher trade barrier than were import tariffs and trade restrictions. Other analyses by the World Bank (2007a) demonstrated that Africa's transport prices were high compared to the value of the goods transported and that transport predictability and reliability were low by international standards. This study's findings should help policy makers take actions that will reduce transport costs to domestic and international trade.

In Central America, like many other developing regions, high transport costs are cited as an impediment to trade and economic growth. Prices for road freight transport -- a key mode of transport comprising a significant share of total transport costs for intra- and extra-regional trade, are particularly high. Averaging 17 cents per ton-kilometer on main trading routes, these rates stand out even relative to other inefficient developing country markets (e.g., central and west Africa). However, the policy and other factors associated with increased prices have not been well understood. This paper uses data from a survey of trucking companies operating on the region's main trade corridors to analyze the determinants of firms' costs of providing service, as well as the effect of market structure and competition on prices. The analysis finds that whereas improved cost efficiencies could reduce prices by 3 cents per ton-kilometer, increased competition on national routes -- those entirely within a nation's borders -- would reduce prices by significantly more. Although there are many trucking companies...

Indonesia's oil revenues and fuel subsidies dominate the nation's economic policy agenda. This paper estimates the impact of higher international oil prices on the Indonesian government's fiscal position in 2008 and beyond. It analyzes the interactions between government revenues and expenditures, as well as international oil prices, energy subsidies, and inter-governmental transfers. Looking at the impact of oil prices over US$100 per barrel, the paper presents five main findings. First, despite record high oil prices, the government's oil and gas revenues have been decreasing relative to non-oil and gas revenues since 2001. Second, fuel subsides will reach record levels in 2008 while electricity subsidies have been increasing even faster. Third, the paper finds that most of the fuel subsidy that directly benefits households goes to the richest 20 percent. Fourth, even at levels above US$100 per barrel, the government receives more revenues from oil and gas than it spends on energy subsidies. However...