Emerta A. Aragie

• PhD in Economics
• Research Fellow at International Food Policy Research Institute

The existence of home production for home consumption (HPHC) in semi-subsistence households is one of the least studied features in economywide models. Neglecting the non-separability of production and consumption decisions by these households can compromise analyses of policy and external shocks in developing countries, potentially leading to misg...

Context The livestock sector is undergoing rapid changes, and governments are designing sector development plans to account for this transition. However, the fundamental assumptions behind the medium- to long-term growth strategies of the sector should be looked at from the perspective of the dynamics in the domestic and global economy, and uncerta...

Motivation Policy‐makers dealing with conflicting development goals and constrained budgets must comprehend the relative cost effectiveness of agricultural and rural development initiatives. Purpose We assess the impact of alternative interventions on development outcomes—economic growth, job creation, poverty reduction, and diet quality—to inform...

Several countries across the developing world have designed and implemented agricultural export incentives. However, little is known about the effects of these policies on various aspects of domestic food security. This study utilizes economywide models linked top-down with microsimulation modules to analyze the impacts of increased agricultural ex...

Many developing countries have implemented price support policies for cereals, but their effects on production, prices, and welfare remain unclear. Using an economywide model calibrated with data from Ethiopia, we analyze the impacts of various producer and consumer price support policies in situations when agricultural productivity changes. We fin...

Semi-subsistence households in developing countries play a considerable role as both producers and consumers of agricultural products, with a substantial part of their consumption contributed by home production for home consumption (HPHC). This study employs a modeling framework that integrates an HPHC augmented database with a modified economywide...

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in developing countries. The accompanying socio-economic implications have been areas of debate among politicians, policymakers and development agents. This paper argues that the traditional way of simulating the impacts of these investments in developi...

Periodic droughts highly influence the dynamics of the cattle population in tropical Africa, including Ethiopia, which in turn creates dramatic drops in post-shock herd size, and disturbs the sex and age structure. The ability to recover from demographic shocks is fundamental in livestock systems frequently affected by drought and epidemics. This a...

Reducing the huge level of food losses and waste is arguably one of the sustainable ways of closing the food requirement gap in developing countries. Examining selected sub-Saharan Africa countries and utilizing the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ Food Balance Sheet data, this study suggests that these countries lose over 2...

The COVID‐19 impact on the global economy combined with partial lockdown measures in Ethiopia represents a large, unprecedented shock to the country's economy. The social accounting matrix (SAM) multiplier model, built on the most up‐to‐date SAM (2017) for Ethiopia, shows that the country suffered a 14.3% loss in GDP (Birr 43.5 billion or US$1.9 bi...

Following the price hikes of 2007–2008 and 2010–2011, many governments in low-income countries implemented food export bans. While several studies investigate the macroeconomic impacts of such bans on large net exporters of grains, only very few country case studies have examined the economy-wide and distributional effects combined. Further, there...

Motivation Many developing countries have identified a set of strategic objectives and a longlist of investment areas to promote agricultural production and ensure food security. However, most of these countries lack the financial and technical capacity to execute all of the strategic objectives and investment areas, calling for a robust comparison...

Restrictions on staple or cash crop exports are frequently imposed in developing countries to promote food security or industrial development. By diverting production to local markets, these policies tend to reduce prices and increase domestic supply of food or intermediate inputs in the short term, to the benefit of consumers or manufacturers, whi...

Despite the high food price crisis of 2008 and 2012, most governments in developing countries continue to support an open trade stance with the rest of the world and promote agricultural exports. However, there is scarce evidence on the synergetic effects of promoting agricultural export on domestic food security, and more particularly on the distr...

Reducing food losses and waste (FLW) is arguably one of the sustainable ways of closing the food requirement gap in developing countries. However, there is not yet adequate knowledge on the extent of FLW by commodity type and stage of the food supply chain (FSC). Focusing on ten agrarian countries in Africa and building mainly on FAO's Food Balance...

By developing a model that describes the Kenyan coffee value chain, this study evaluates opportunities emanating from four scenarios representing productivity gains in the various value chain stages of the coffee sector and additional three scenarios reflecting shifts in market situations. Results show that productivity-enhancing policies have stro...

Most developing economies have introduced price support programs for selected cereals. We examine the price, quantity, and welfare effects of alternative producer and consumer price policies combined with public cereal storage when agriculture productivity either increases or decreases. We find that producer price support policies are production en...

This document provides a description of the comparative static version of STAGE_DEV single-country computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, which is a variant/development of the STAGE 2 single country CGE model. This model embeds several new distinctive features which make this version tailored for the ex-ante impact analysis of national policie...

Studies on the impacts of external and policy shocks in semi-subsistence economies are typically based on databases and models that miss some of the salient features of these economies. This study addresses some of these issues by (i) developing an enhanced database, (ii) extending a CGE model to include, inter alia, non-separable household decisio...

Twenty years after the launch of market reforms, productive entrepreneurship and vibrant small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ethiopia remain limited, the recent growth acceleration notwithstanding. This paper develops a model of entrepreneurial start ups in an economy with frictions in the product and labor markets and a large informal sec...

Almost twenty years after the launch of market reforms, Ethiopia's highly productive small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) remain scarce. This paper presents a simple model of SME start ups with frictions in the business climate and imperfect information in the labor market that characterize the Ethiopian institutional landscape. Since such mar...

Twenty years after the launch of market reforms, productive entrepreneurship and vibrant small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ethiopia remain limited, the recent growth acceleration notwithstanding. This paper first develops a model of entrepreneurial start ups in an economy with frictions in the product and labor markets and a large inform...

While knowing the size and evolution of the underground economy is important for policy making, its very nature makes anyone very skeptical of any attempt to measure its magnitude. With booming literature on methodological issues and measurement attempts for the last three decades, the skepticism is becoming less daunting. However, research on the...

In spite of the case that the paper to some extent touched pension fund reforms in some countries from public managed to fully funded one, the central theme of this paper is to offer background information and analysis for policy dialogue on introducing private pension funds for the other segments of the society employed in the private and informal...