Christophe Gouel

Christophe Gouel
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Paris-Saclay Applied Economics

PhD

About

42
Publications
7,674
Reads
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879
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2019 - present
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)
Position
  • Senior Researcher
July 2012 - February 2017
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)
Position
  • Research Associate
January 2017 - June 2018
International Food Policy Research Institute
Position
  • Fellow
Education
September 2008 - April 2011
École Polytechnique
Field of study
  • Economics

Publications

Publications (42)
Article
Many countries adjust their trade policies counter-cyclically with food prices, to the extent that the use of restrictions by food-exporting countries has occasionally threatened the food security of food-importing countries. These trade policies are inconsistent with the terms-of-trade motivation often retained to characterize the payoff frontier...
Article
Full-text available
Estimating future demand for food is a critical aspect of global food security analyses. The process linking dietary changes to wealth is known as the nutrition transition and presents well-identified features that help to predict consumption changes in poor countries. This study proposes to represent the nutrition transition with a nonhomothetic,...
Article
This article provides a framework to estimate the potential effects and benefits of the provision of market information in storable commodity markets. This framework is applied to the case of production forecasts for the soybean market. A rational expectations storage model of the global soybean market accounting for both inter‐annual and intra‐ann...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change effects on agricultural yields will be uneven over the world. A few countries, mostly in high latitudes, may experience gains, while most will see average yield decrease. This paper aims to quantify the role of market-mediated adjustments in attenuating the effects of climate change by allowing the expression of the new climate-induc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Monetary conditions are frequently cited as a significant factor influencing fluctuations in commodity prices. However, the precise channels of transmission are less well identified. In this paper, we develop a unified theory to study the impact of interest rates on commodity prices and the underlying mechanisms. To that end, we extend the competit...
Article
We show analytically and quantitatively how gains from trade depend on love of variety, defined as the extent to which an additional product variety generates benefits in either final or intermediate consumption. To do this, we use a multi-country, multi-sector heterogeneous-firm gravity trade model where love of variety is parameterized separately...
Chapter
This chapter reviews how the literature on trade in agricultural and food products has developed over the last 20 years. Its evolution has been heavily influenced by several developments in the international trade literature. The first relates to trade theories that connect closely with observables: new Ricardian models and firm-level analysis. The...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This paper shows how gains from trade are conditioned by love of variety, defined as the extent to which an additional product variety generates benefits in either final or intermediate consumption. We develop a multi-country, multisector gravity trade model where love of variety is parameterized separately from product substitutability using a gen...
Chapter
This chapter helps readers to understand what determines the term structure of the price of futures contracts. "Term structure" refers to the relationship between the prices of contracts with different deadlines. The chapter provides information to help answer the questions: are futures markets a good tool for forecasting future physical prices?; a...
Article
We present a method to estimate jointly the parameters of a standard commodity storage model and the parameters characterizing the trend in commodity prices. This procedure allows the influence of a possible trend to be removed without restricting the model specification, and allows model and trend selection based on statistical criteria. The trend...
Article
L’accroissement de la population mondiale et l’augmentation des niveaux de vie constituent des défis pour l’agriculture de demain, tant en termes de capacités d’offre que de gestion des externalités liées à ces transformations (émissions de gaz à effet de serre, pollution des eaux…). Anticiper les modifications des habitudes alimentaires pour mieux...
Article
Full-text available
Le retour d'une importante volatilité des prix agricoles au cours de la dernière décennie a relancé le débat sur les politiques de stabilisation des prix. Cette synthèse fait le point sur ce débat en se basant essentiellement sur les travaux issus des recherches du département SAE2 de l'Inra. Cette synthèse tente de répondre à trois questions. (1)...
Article
India has pursued an active food security policy for many years by using a combination of trade policy interventions, public distribution of food staples, and assistance to farmers through minimum support prices defended by public stocks. This approach has been quite successful in stabilizing staple food prices, but comes at a high cost, and with p...
Book
De nombreux pays ajustent leur politique commerciale de manière contracyclique par rapport aux prix alimentaires, au point que les restrictions aux exportations utilisées par beaucoup de pays exportateurs ont occasionnellement menacé la sécurité alimentaire des pays importateurs. Notre article analyse la coordination des politiques commerciales lor...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyzes the use of storage and trade policies to achieve food price stabilization in a small open developing country. Optimal stabilization policies are identified using a rational expectations storage model with risk-averse consumers and incomplete markets. Without public intervention, price dynamics are driven by domestic productive s...
Chapter
Full-text available
When food prices spike in countries with large numbers of poor people, public intervention is essential to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. For governments, this is also a case of political survival. Government actions often take the form of direct interventions in the market to stabilize food prices, which goes against most international advice...
Article
This article compares various policies in a rational expectations food storage model with risk-averse consumers and missing insurance markets calibrated to represent a developing country. I consider an optimal storage policy under discretion and two optimal simple rules: a constant private storage subsidy and a price band. The storage subsidy achie...
Article
Full-text available
In times of highly volatile commodity markets, governments often try to protect their populations from rapidly rising food prices, which can be particularly harmful for the poor. A potential solution for food-deficit countries is to hold strategic reserves that can be called on when international prices spike. But how large should strategic stockpi...
Chapter
Full-text available
Questions of food sustainability cannot be limited to the national sphere, insofar as international interactions are undeniable. This chapter focuses on their role, concentrating on the volatility of global food prices and on public and private norms and standards. The international dimension of these questions is reflected first of all by questio...
Chapter
As western-style food systems extend further around the world, food sustainability is becoming an increasingly important issue. Such systems are not sustainable in terms of their consumption of resources, their impact on ecosystems or their effect on health and social inequality. From 2009 to 2011, the duALIne project, led by INRA and CIRAD, assemb...
Article
Full-text available
This paper compares numerical methods for solving the competitive storage model. Because storage implies a nonnegativity constraint on stocks, the solution methods must be considered carefully. The model is solved using value function iteration and several projection approaches, including parameterised expectations and decision rules approximation....
Article
This paper proposes a framework for designing optimal food price stabilisation policies in a self-sufficient developing country. It uses a rational expectations storage model with risk-averse consumers and incomplete markets. Government stabilises food prices by carrying public stock and by applying state-contingent subsidy/tax to production. The p...
Article
There are two explanations for agricultural price dynamics. One follows cobweb logic and models fluctuations driven by expectation errors but emphasises that these expectations create complex dynamics and possibly chaos. The other stems from the rational expectations tradition of dynamics driven by real shocks. The empirical evidence tends to suppo...
Article
Given the highly concentrated distribution of agricultural protection, allowing in the negotiations too many exceptions through sensitive products puts at risk the objectives of World Trade Organization. This issue is difficult to analyze with the commonly used applied trade models, because they represent trade flows at an aggregate level, while se...
Thesis
Full-text available
This thesis proposes an analysis of food price stabilisation policies in poor countries. In order to represent the conditions in these countries, we introduce in a rational expectations storage model the assumption that consumers cannot insure against price risk and are risk averse. The market incompleteness justifies public intervention and variou...
Article
Full-text available
For years, the agricultural policies of the United States and the European Union have been the object of internal debate at the same time as they have been at the heart of agricultural discussions in the Doha round of WTO negotiations. The CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) is being examined in the framework of the “Health Check” and of the general r...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The purpose of this Research Memorandum is to propose an approach to incorporating forest access cost functions into global general equilibrium models such as GTAP. Towards this end, we develop a long run access cost function which can be calibrated to national data on total forest land, currently inaccessible forest land, forest land rents, and ex...

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