RESUMO
Sub-Saharan African countries experience various market failures and other constraints in food production, marketing, and food consumption. Consequently, sub-Saharan Africa governments have put in place a myriad of policies to counter these failures. Agricultural, food and nutrition policies address nutrition outcomes, such as hunger, undernourishment, wasting, stunting, child mortality, inadequate food consumption, food insecurity, and volatile food prices, thus improve nutrition outcomes among the population. However, malnutrition persists among the population in the region. To mitigate this challenge, informed, evidence-based policy development and implementation by policy practitioners is of essence. The solutions to the double burden of undernutrition and obesity cut across the agriculture, rural development, and public health sectors. This essay introduces twenty papers of this Special Issue of the Food Policy journal which analyzes 8 policy domains, contributes to the debate on the linkages and pathways through which policies influence food security, nutrition outcomes, and related indicators and points to policy directions in these domains.
RESUMO
Oil-dependent countries face a twin-shock: in addition to the COVID-19 outbreak, they are facing an oil price collapse. In this paper, we study the impact of this dual shock on the forecasted GDP growth in Africa using the COVID-19 outbreak as a natural experiment. We use the IMF World Economic Outlook's GDP growth forecasts before and after the outbreak. We find that COVID-19 related deaths result in -2.75 percentage points forecasted GDP growth loss in the all sample while oil-dependence induces -7.6 percentage points loss. We document that the joint shock entails higher forecasted growth loss in oil-dependent economies (-10.75 percentage points). Based on oil price forecasts and our empirical findings, we identify five recovery policies with high potential: social safety net policy, economic diversification, innovation and technological transformation, fiscal discipline, and climate-friendly recovery policy.
RESUMO
This study endeavors to answer two questions: which category of excise taxes is more appropriate for Senegal and Nigeria and which consequences an increase of the tobacco taxes would have on the price, the demand and the tax revenues in each one of the two countries? To answer these questions, we adopt a double approach: first, a theoretical model of taxation with variety; and second, a simulation model to answer the second question. The results of the theoretical model indicate that, in the context of excise taxation, the number of products variety-or that of cigarette brands-directly affects both the degree of market concentration and the marginal effects of specific and ad valorem excise taxes on the price of tobacco. In addition, the comparison of the marginal effects of ad valorem and specific excise taxes depends on the marginal costs of production of different varieties weighted by the tax rates and the number of varieties. Our empirical results first show that the specific excise taxes are more adapted to Senegal while ad valorem excise taxes fit best Nigeria. This result crucially matters for the excise taxes are exclusively of an ad valorem nature in both Senegal and Nigeria. It is perfectly possible to envisage a situation where the two main forms of excise taxes could co-exist. It also appears from our results that tax development does not have the same implications for the two countries. Increasing tobacco taxes in Senegal strongly reduces the demand, but also induces a decrease in the tax revenues, while this will imply a lesser decline in demand in Nigeria accompanied however by a sharp increase of the country's tax revenues. This difference stems from the fact that the price-elasticity of tobacco demand is very high in Senegal, contrary to Nigeria. Finally, it is important to mention that there is a specific threshold beyond which the tax increases cease to have a positive effect on tax revenues in Nigeria.
