David LabordeFood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations | FAO
David Laborde
PhD in Economics
About
179
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Introduction
I have joined the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI, Washington DC) in 2007. I am a Senior Research Fellow in the Markets, Trade and Institutions Division and the Theme Leader on Macroeconomics and Trade for IFPRI.
My research interests include globalization, international trade, measurement and modeling of protectionism, multilateral and regional trade liberalization as well as environmental issues (climate change, biofuels). Recently, I have focused on quantifying the roadmap to achieving SDG2 in a globalized context while considering the role of goods, capital, and migration flows.
Beyond my work on databases, I have developed several partial and general equilibrium models applied to trade policy and environmental issues, including the MIRAGE and MIRAGRODEP models and their extensions.
Additional affiliations
October 2007 - present
January 2005 - September 2007
Publications
Publications (179)
Modelling approaches and related policy recommendations to inform food system transformation to address sustainable agriculture, food security and nutrition and aspects of biodiversity protection with focus on Indonesia.
After the sharp rise in international prices of wheat and other staple foods in the wake of Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, since May prices have fallen back to pre-war levels. Has the global food price crisis now come to an end? Unfortunately, such a conclusion is premature. Domestic food prices for consumers continue to rise in most countr...
Ethiopia is not on track to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, with poverty and hunger levels projected to be higher in 2030 than they are today. This is being made worse by the conflict in Tigray, swarms of desert locusts, an economic slowdown, skyrocketing food, fertilizer, and energy prices—exacerbated by the Russi...
Almost a year after the February 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine, fears of a period of sustained high global food prices have subsided somewhat, but eight major concerns for food security remain.
Malawi is not on track to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by
2030. Its lack of progress is being exacerbated by skyrocketing food, fertilizer, and energy prices; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the COVID-19 pandemic; and climate change. To get back on track, it is critical to pursue policy pathways that favour synergies a...
The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) is an award-winning independent think tank working to accelerate solutions for a stable climate, sustainable resource management, and fair economies. Our work inspires better decisions and sparks meaningful action to help people and the planet thrive. We shine a light on what can be ach...
Governments, donors and others must step up to protect current and future generations from the devastating effects of malnutrition, as well as to prevent acute food insecurity. Governments, donors and others must step up to protect current and future generations from the devastating effects of malnutrition, as well as to prevent acute food insecuri...
Food prices are skyrocketing around the world. In January, international prices for major food items climbed to a level near the heights of the global food price crises of 2007-08 and 2010-11, according to the FAO Food Price Index (Figure 1). The spike has raised concerns over the potential for another global food crisis, increasing hunger among th...
The upcoming WTO Ministerial in November 2021 will once again provide WTO Members with an opportunity to address and reform agricultural domestic support. This paper used the MIRAGRODEP model to examine three broad questions: First, what would be the effect on agricultural trade if Members were to fully utilize domestic support entitlements under t...
Unaffordability of healthy diets affected 3 billion people before the COVID-19 pandemic, 2.5 billion of whom lived in 63 low- and middle-income countries. In these 63 countries, income losses due to the pandemic have markedly worsened the affordability gap. The proportion of people unable to afford half the cost of a healthy diet increased from 43%...
The economic crisis and food and health system disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic threaten to exacerbate undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We developed pessimistic, moderate and optimistic scenarios for 2020–2022 and used three modelling tools (MIRAGRODEP, the Lives Saved Tool and Optima Nutrition) to estimate th...
Agricultural production is strongly affected by and a major contributor to climate change. Agriculture and land-use change account for a quarter of total global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Agriculture receives around US$600 billion per year worldwide in government support. No rigorous quantification of the impact of this support on GHG emi...
This study assesses the impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) on poverty, food insecurity, and diets, accounting for the complex links between the crisis and the incomes and living costs of vulnerable households. Key elements are impacts on labor supply, effects of social distancing, shifts in demand from services involving close contact, i...
This note provides the methodology underlying a newly created database mapping GHG emissions from agriculture by source, commodity, and country. It is supplementary material to a new study by David Laborde, Abdullah Mamun, Will Martin, Valeria Pineiro, & Rob Vos on Agricultural subsidies and global greenhouse gas emissions under final review by Nat...
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...
This chapter provides an overview of the current and estimated impacts for 2021 and 2022 of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America and the Caribbean and discuss possible policy responses, focusing on food systems. This is a preliminary analysis, considering that at the time of this writing the pandemic is still evolving, with not clear resolution i...
The COVID-19-related economic crisis and food- and health-system disruptions threaten to exacerbate undernutrition in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). We used three modelling tools (MIRAGRODEP, Lives Saved Tool, and Optima Nutrition Tool) to estimate impacts on child stunting, wasting, and mortality, maternal anemia, children born to low BM...
This study assesses the impact of COVID-19 on poverty, food insecurity and diets, accounting for the complex links between the crisis and the incomes and living costs of vulnerable households. Key
elements are impacts on labor supply; effects of social distancing; shifts in demand from services involving close contact; increases in the cost of logi...
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, some governments have implemented export restrictions and other trade policy measures to secure their food supply. This behavior can increase global food prices, with consequences including the exacerbation of hunger and income losses for producers in export-restricting countries. Intergovernmental organizations...
Agricultural production is both strongly affected by climate change and a major contributor to climate change, with agriculture and land use change accounting for around a quarter of total global emissions of greenhouse gases. Agricultural production benefits from substantial government support, costing around US$600 billion per year worldwide. The...
Agricultural production is both strongly affected by climate change and a major contributor to climate change, with agriculture and land use change accounting for around a quarter of total global emissions of greenhouse gases. Agricultural production benefits from substantial government support, costing around US$600 billion per year worldwide. The...
This study provides a quantitative assessment of progress made towards the sustainable development goal of ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition since 1990. Using a cluster analysis, it categorizes country performance along three dimensions: (1) food security and nutrition outcomes; (2) structural drivers of food security and nutrition; and (...
To understand the impacts of support programs on global emissions, this paper considers the impacts of domestic subsidies, price distortions at the border, and investments in emission-reducing technologies on global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture. In a step towards a full evaluation of the impacts, it uses a counterfactual global m...
COVID-19 poses acute threats to food security. The worst of these arise from the global recession that is causing many to lose their incomes and threatens the access of many vulnerable people to the food they need. Other threats arise from disruptions in agricultural input markets, production, marketing, and distribution of food. To avoid major foo...
With COVID-19 and its economic fallout now spreading in the poorest parts of the world, many more people will become poor and food-insecure. In a new scenario analysis, we estimate that globally, absent interventions, over 140 million people could fall into extreme poverty (measured against the $1.90 poverty line) in 2020 — an increase of 20% from...
As COVID-19 spreads around the globe, fears of a deep global recession are mounting. Some also fear that food supplies may start running short, especially if supply chains are disrupted. Others fear that agricultural production may be disrupted by containment measures that restrict workers from harvesting and handling crops. While we should take th...
COVID-19 is a once in a lifetime crisis for people and the planet. The pandemic is showing us what it means to face a crisis in a world whose systems are global and interlinked. In a matter of months, most of the world has been touched by COVID-19. In its wake, government efforts to address the health and economic impacts of the virus are exposing...
A recent review of common modelling practices conducted during the Workshop “Shaping long-term baselines with Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models” held at OECD in January 2018 showed that models include different assumptions on changes to the production function along their dynamic baselines. These changes imply shifts in sectoral compositi...
With COVID-19 and its economic fallout now spreading in the poorest parts of the world, many more people will become poor and food-insecure. In a new scenario analysis, we estimate that globally, absent interventions, 148 million people could fall into extreme poverty (measured against the PPP$1.90 poverty line) in 2020—an increase of 20% from pres...
This report looks in detail at agricultural support in a dozen WTO members. It examines how this support relates to public policy goals, the type of domestic support instruments chosen, and countries’ current WTO limits on support. It finds that as much as three
quarters of all support classed as trade-distorting by the WTO is concentrated in a han...
To guide policymaking, decision makers require a good understanding of the long-term drivers of food security and their interactions. Scenario analysis is widely considered as the appropriate tool to assess ‘wicked problems’, such as ensuring global food security, that are characterized by a high level of complexity and uncertainty. This paper desc...
The Ceres2030 project explores and builds on this knowledge by combining state-of-the-art modelling techniques with expert evidence to estimate costs of possible policy interventions that will help in achieving SDG 2. In this technical paper the authors identify a set of interventions that can be integrated into an economic model (the “model”) and...
In 2016 the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) projected the cost of ending world hunger by 2030 using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model combined with household surveys from a sample of seven countries from sub-Saharan Africa (Laborde, Bizikova, Lalleman...
This note outlines how we define and model environmental How We Plan to Integrate Environmental Sustainability sustainability in the meantime, until official indicators for SDG 2.4 are available. In Section 2 we discuss current proposals for how to measure SDG 2.4 and give our reasons for the environmental indicators we have chosen. In Section 3 we...
This chapter uses a statistical approach to explore African agricultural competitiveness. We illustrate competitiveness through three means : microeconomic drivers, macroeconomic drivers, and impact. We discuss the evolution of Africa’s competitiveness, comparing the competitiveness of Africa’s regional economic communities (RECs) with the world an...
The trade war between the United States and China involves the two largest players in the world economy (i.e., the two countries with the largest GDPs, and the largest exporters and importers). Consequently, increasing trade tensions between these two giants are a major stake and it is expected that these tensions will negatively affect third count...
Argentina’s G20 presidency has emphasized the need to improve soil management and sustainably increase agricultural productivity to achieve an inclusive and resilient food future. While increased agricultural productivity can improve economic welfare and help address food security problems by benefiting both consumers and producers simultaneously,...
In the event of large swings in world food prices, countries often intervene to dampen the impact of international food price spikes on domestic prices and to lessen the burden of adjustment on vulnerable population groups. While individual countries can succeed at insulating their domestic markets from short-term fluctuations in global food prices...
In a context of rising protectionist rhetoric, this paper looks at the potential impact of trade wars initiated by a change in US trade policies. We use a static multicountry, multisector general equilibrium model to evaluate six modalities of three potential trade wars—for a total of 18 scenarios—between the USA and China, between the USA and Mexi...
This brochure describes the CERES 2030 project.
Ceres2030 brings together a diverse and global community to build consensus on the interventions needed to end hunger and transform the lives of the world’s poorest farmers— while protecting the environment.
Over the past 25 years, higher growth in developing countries has contributed to a dramatic fall in global poverty, although poverty rates in rural areas remain higher than in urban areas. Unfortunately, projected growth rates have fallen in recent years; this paper examines the impact of this slowdown on the poor, particularly the rural poor. It f...
As part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), world leaders have committed to ending hunger by 2030. Yet despite unprecedented progress made in recent decades, the world is not on track to reach the goal. Current levels of spending to end hunger are inadequate. THE COST OF ENDING HUNGER How much would it cost to end chronic hunger globally?...
As part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), world leaders have committed to ending hunger by 2030. Yet despite unprecedented progress made in recent decades, the world is not on track to reach the goal. Current levels of spending to end hunger are inadequate. THE COST OF ENDING HUNGER How much would it cost to end chronic hunger globally?...
This paper reviews the literature on the measurement and characterization of trade integration in Africa. We offer the complete evaluation of available indicators and methodologies. The indicators include those that have recently emerged from network analysis including indicators of trade in value-added commodities. It is concluded that Africa is c...
Many developing countries seem likely to see a substantial downturn in economic growth over the 2015–2030 implementation period of the SDGs, compared with the recent years of strong growth. Since the 2015 WEO, the macroeconomic outlook has deteriorated further, with projected global growth for 2017 falling from 3.8 to 3.5 percent. However, a key re...
Our recently published report found that it would cost on average an extra USD 11 billion per year on top of current public spending between 2015 and 2030 to largely end hunger, part of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2.
We estimated that donors need to provide USD 4 billion of the total, and the remaining USD 7 billion needs to come from poor c...
Despite recent modifications, the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the European Union (EU) and West African (WA) countries is still being criticized for its potential detrimental effects on WA countries. This paper provides updated evidence on the impact of the EPA on these countries. A dynamic multi-country, multi-sector computable gen...
Evolution of international agricultural trade, resources contents of trade and implication for China.
This book is devoted to the complex relationship between the global trading system and food security, focusing on two important elements: the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) and how food price volatility can be managed, or not, through trade instruments. The first section of the book is based on the premise that more trade integration can fight pover...
Until now, existing literature and datasets monitoring the impact of agricultural and trade policies on agricultural incentives and distortions have avoided tackling this issue from a gender perspective. If it is well acknowledged that female farmers play a critical role in the farm system, especially for smallholders, the specific impacts of farm...
The aim of this article is to assess the impact of the European Union’s trade preferences on bilateral trade flows. Using highly disaggregated 8-digit import data in a theoretically grounded gravity model framework, we define an explicit measure of preferential tariff margins and use that to estimate sector-specific elasticities. From the methodolo...
IIt is important to measure and analyse the impacts of policy design on agricultural markets. Indirect measurement of incidence, e.g. nominal rate of protection (NRP), is one reliable method to do this, as it relies on price gaps between what producers see and what is prevailing in international markets. Ag-Incentives Consortium, a collaboration ef...
The research considers that a country has achieved the goal of ending hunger when the number of hungry people is less than 5 percent of the population. or the seven African countries, the research found that it would cost, on average, an extra US$1 billion per year between now and 2030 to end hunger. Approximately US$400 million of the extra cost w...
In this paper, we focus on the use of food security as a justification for export taxation. During food crisis, governments of food-exporting countries are tempted to react to high food prices by restricting exports. This is to encourage local producers to sell food items domestically and to decrease local prices, which implies higher world food pr...
In this paper, we focus on the use of food security as a justification for export taxation. During food crisis, governments of food-exporting countries are tempted to react to high food prices by restricting exports. This is to encourage local producers to sell food items domestically and to decrease local prices, which implies higher world food pr...
We consider a general equilibrium model of international trade with two identical countries, two commodities, a terms-of-trade externality, and a double-tier informational problem. Domestic producers have private information on their technology. This first layer of private information affects the design of ``behind-the-border" policies. Such within...