Sherman Robinson

International Food Policy Research Institute · Environment and Production Technology Division

This study investigates the financial cost of increasing the diversity of cereal grains in livestock feed rations. We first develop a nonlinear mathematical programming model that determines the least-cost composition of livestock feed rations of one metric ton that have at least the same energy and nutrient content as a reference feed ration. We t...

in 1975, provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition. IFPRI's strategic research aims to foster a climate-resilient and sustainable food supply; promote healthy diets and nutrition for all; build inclusive and efficient markets, trade systems, and food industries; transform agricultural and...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00224-w

More than 1 million foreign students study in the United States. On July 6, 2020, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced modifications to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program eliminating temporary exemptions for nonimmigrant students taking all classes online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in the fall 2020 semester. For...

More than 1 million foreign students study in the United States. On July 6, 2020, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced modifications to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program eliminating temporary exemptions for nonimmigrant students taking all classes online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in the fall 2020 semester. For...

African swine fever is a deadly porcine disease that has spread into East Asia where it is having a detrimental effect on pork production. However, the implications of African swine fever on the global pork market are poorly explored. Two linked global economic models are used to explore the consequences of different scales of the epidemic on pork...

This is an earlier version of an article appeared in Population, Space and Place (PSP). This version includes in an appendix the Migration Pathway Matrices referred to in the PSP paper (also available as supplementary information of PSP paper). It also provides the share of moves between and within rural and urban areas. People may move more than o...

Palm oil production has increased rapidly over the past two decades in response to rising demand for its use in food, energy, and industrial applications.1 In an era of increasing pressure on natural resources, however, expansion of oil palm plantations presents a dilemma: On the one hand, oil palm is the most productive oil crop in the world; on t...

We use IFPRI's IMPACT framework of linked biophysical and structural economic models to examine developments in global agricultural production systems, climate change, and food security. Building on related work on how increased investment in agricultural research, resource management, and infrastructure can address the challenges of meeting future...

US trade policy in the Trump administration is protectionist, raising tariffs outside of WTO rules, threatening trade wars, withdrawing from existing trade agreements, and negotiating new bilateral trade deals rather than free trade agreements. The reaction of the rest of the world has been to support the WTO rules-based trading system and to pursu...

Background The consumption of red and processed meat has been associated with increased mortality from chronic diseases, and as a result, it has been classified by the World Health Organization as carcinogenic (processed meat) and probably carcinogenic (red meat) to humans. One policy response is to regulate red and processed meat consumption simil...

Supplementary information. (PDF)

If trade tensions between the United States and certain trading partners escalate into a full-blown trade war, what should developing countries do? Using a global, general equilibrium model, this paper first simulates the effects of an increase in U.S. tariffs on imports from all regions to about 30 percent (the average non-Most Favored Nation tari...

In the context of the project Quantitative Foresight Modeling to Inform the CGIAR Research Portfolio, IFPRI’s International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) was linked to the global dynamic computable general equilibrium model, GLOBE-Energy. This linkage is documented here to provide a detailed account of the...

Simulation models are powerful tools that help us understand, analyze, and explain dynamic, complex systems. They provide empirical methodologies to explore how systems and agents behave and consider how they may change when responding to shocks and stresses. The power of these tools, however, depends on the quality of the data on which they are bu...

Ongoing debate over water management along the Blue Nile and land degradation in Ethiopia emphasizes the need for efficiency gains in agricultural production through sustainable land management (SLM). However, previous SLM studies overlook the tradeoffs involved in maintaining SLM investments over time. We address this limitation by combining a hou...

This report provides a quantitative assessment of the impacts of alternative investment options on the CGIAR’s SLOs (relating to poverty – SLO1, food and nutrition security – SLO2, and natural resources and ecosystem services – SLO3) in the context of changes in population, income, technology, and climate to 2050 as well as for key SDGs of importan...

Demographic transition due to population aging is an emerging trend throughout the developing world, and it is especially acute in China, which has undergone demographic transition more rapidly than have most industrial economies. This paper quantifies the distributional effects in the context of demographic transition using an integrated recursive...

Fungal diseases are major threats to the most important crops upon which humanity depends. Were there to be a major epidemic that severely reduced yields, its effects would spread throughout the globalized food system. To explore these ramifications, we use a partial equilibrium economic model of the global food system (IMPACT) to study a hypotheti...

The projected rise in food-related greenhouse gas emissions could seriously impede efforts to limit global warming to acceptable levels. Despite that, food production and consumption have long been excluded from climate policies, in part due to concerns about the potential impact on food security. Using a coupled agriculture and health modelling fr...

Achieving and maintaining global food security is challenged by changes in population, income, and climate, among other drivers. Assessing these threats and weighing possible solutions requires a robust multidisciplinary approach. One such approach integrates biophysical modeling with economic modeling to explore the combined effects of climate str...

The food sector is responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, and significant changes in food production and patterns of food consumption are required in order for the food sector to make its pro rata contribution to climate change mitigation. At the same time, imbalanced diets, such as diets high in red and processed me...

This paper describes a linked, modular, system of models called IMPACT that includes global economic and water models to explore the impact of different irrigation investment scenarios under changing conditions of water availability (e.g., climate shocks, ground water shortages. The core economic model is a global, partial-equilibrium, multimarket...

Background One of the most important consequences of climate change could be its effects on agriculture. Although much research has focused on questions of food security, less has been devoted to assessing the wider health impacts of future changes in agricultural production. In this modelling study, we estimate excess mortality attributable to agr...

The International Food Policy Research Institute’s International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) supports analysis of long-term challenges and opportunities for food, agriculture, and natural resources at global and regional scales. IMPACT is continually being updated and improved to better inform the choice...

This paper uses a three-step Bayesian cross-entropy estimation approach in an environment of noisy and scarce data to estimate behavioral parameters for a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and to measure how labor augmenting productivity and other structural parameters in the model may have shifted over time to contribute to the generation...

This paper develops a dynamic, stochastic, general-equilibrium model to analyze and derive simple budget rules in the face of volatile public revenue from natural resources in a low-income country like Niger. The simulation results suggest three policy lessons or rules of thumb. When a resource price change is positive and temporary, the best strat...

Achieving and maintaining global food security is challenged by changes in population, income, and climate, among other drivers. Assessing these challenges and possible solutions over the coming decades requires a rigorous multidisciplinary approach. To answer this challenge, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has developed a...

In this paper, we use a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to examine spending strategies in Niger, a resource-rich, low-income country that has a windfall gain from mineral export revenue. The recent literature on Dutch disease describes alternative policy rules to manage the income flow from the expected natural resource...

This study advances the state of the art in country-level computable general equilibrium analysis for climate change impact and adaptation analysis by incorporating forward-looking expectations. The analytic framework is used to explore the long-run growth prospects for Egypt in a changing climate. Based on a review of existing estimates of climate...

Background One of the most important consequences of climate change could be its impact on agriculture. While much research has focused on questions of food security, less attention has been devoted to assessing the wider health impacts of future changes in agricultural production. We estimate excess mortality due to agriculturally mediated changes...

Previous studies have combined climate, crop and economic models to examine the impact of climate change on agricultural production and food security, but results have varied widely due to differences in models, scenarios and input data. Recent work has examined (and narrowed) these differences through systematic model intercomparison using a high-...

The provision of food has been a central preoccupation of policy-makers throughout history. Today we are witnessing a period of food security pessimism triggered by increases in food prices, and their higher volatility, that began in 2008. However, previous episodes of food pessimism were ended by the Industrial and Green Revolutions, and policy-ma...

The International Food Policy Research Institute’s International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) supports analysis of long-term challenges and opportunities for food, agriculture, and natural resources at global and regional scales. IMPACT is continually being updated and improved to better inform the choice...

Reviews the major challenges and current water and agriculture context, plans, and policies following difficult years of drought and catastrophic monsoon flooding in Pakistan's Indus Basin. The years from 2009 through 2011 offer a perspective on the current challenges of water and food security, along with mounting future uncertainties that the fed...

The last version of Indus Basin Model Revised (IBMR) is based on data from 2000 (primarily the Agricultural Statistics of Pakistan and water-related data from the Water and Power Development Authority [WAPDA]) and earlier farm surveys (for example, 1976 XAES Survey of Irrigation Agriculture and the Farm Re-Survey in 1988 as part of the Water Sector...

Draws together findings from the chain of analyses on Pakistan's Indus Basin, distinguishing between the relative significance of different scenarios, impacts, and adaptations, and highlighting recommendations for research, planning, and policies that can help expand the range of options for Indus Basin management. Key findings include: (1)The 1991...

Examines the state of the science associated with the snow and ice hydrology in the Upper Indus Basin (IUB), reviewing the literature and data available on the present and projected role of glaciers, snow fields, and stream flow. Considerable speculation but little analysis exists concerning the importance of glaciers in the volume and timing of fl...

Surveys the current policy environment for addressing water and agricultural issues in a changing climate, which is shaped by economic development plans at the national and provincial levels, sector plans for water and agriculture (from long-term, multi-decade plans to medium-term, annual plans), and recent cross-cutting policy documents on climate...

Presents the results of various scenarios using models used to study water, climate, agriculture and the economy in Pakistan's Indus Basin, and discusses the policy and investment implications. The water allocations per the 1991 Provincial Accord and within provinces remain the most critical constraint. Relaxing the Accord constraint, and allowing...

Examines the literature and available data on hydroclimatic variability and change on the Indus Basin plains, comparing historical fluctuations in climatic and hydrologic variables and reviewing scenarios of climate change derived from general circulation models (GCMs), including the generation of future scenarios of changing snow and ice melt in t...

Describes two models used in the integrated modeling framework designed to study water, climate, agriculture and the economy in Pakistan's Indus Basin: (1) the Indus Basin Model Revised (IBMR-1012), a hydro-economic optimization model that takes a variety of inputs (such as agronomic information, irrigation system data, and water inflows) to genera...

Providing the poorest with safety nets and some form of social protection is becoming part of the agenda of the majority of developing countries. And while cash transfer programs started 15 years ago with experiments and pilot projects, there is currently a scaling up of policies in many parts of the developing world. These policies involve large f...

This chapter reviews the experience of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models from the perspective of how they have, or have not, influenced public policy in developing countries. The paper describes different classes of empirical models – from small, stylized to large, multisectoral applied models; from static equilibrium models to dynamic, p...

Significance Plausible estimates of climate change impacts on agriculture require integrated use of climate, crop, and economic models. We investigate the contribution of economic models to uncertainty in this impact chain. In the nine economic models included, the direction of management intensity, area, consumption, and international trade respon...

This article compares the theoretical and functional specification of production in partial equilibrium (PE) and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models of the global agricultural and food system included in the AgMIP model comparison study. The two model families differ in their scope—partial versus economy-wide—and in how they represent techn...

This study, Indus basin of Pakistan: the impacts of climate risks on water and agriculture was undertaken at a pivotal time in the region. The weak summer monsoon in 2009 created drought conditions throughout the country. This followed an already tenuous situation for many rural households faced with high fuel and fertilizer costs and the impacts o...

This paper provides future researchers of economic structure with a model for building a social accounting matrix (SAM), that is, a unique countrywide database for use in structural analysis, and applies this model to the empirical investigation of the economic structure of Pakistan. Our proposed approach to building SAMs is motivated by an informa...

Public investments and policies under Pakistan's New Framework for Economic Growth are expected to lead to substantial gains in productivity, especially in the industrial and service sectors of Pakistan's economy. Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model simulations using a new 2008 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Pakistan show that achieving...

This paper presents the latest Social Accounting Matrix of Pakistan (SAM) for the year 2007-08. Our proposed approach to estimating SAMs is motivated by an information theoretic approach to estimation (Judge & Mittelhammer, 2012) that takes a Bayesian perspective on the efficient use of information: “Use all the information you have, but do not ass...

This study links a multisectoral, regionalized, dynamic, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of Ethiopia with a system country‐specific hydrology, crop, road, and hydropower engineering models to simulate the economic impacts of climate change scenarios from global circulation models (GCMs) to 2050. In the absence of externally funded, polic...

The papers in this special issue represent some of the most comprehensive analyses of the implications of climate change for developing countries undertaken to date. The papers employ a bottoms‐up systems approach whereby the implications of climate change are evaluated using structural models of agriculture and infrastructure systems. The authors...

Analysis of climate change is often computationally burdensome. Here, we present an approach for intelligently selecting a sample of climates from a population of 6800 climates designed to represent the full distribution of likely climate outcomes out to 2050 for the Zambeze River Valley. Philosophically, our approach draws upon information theory....

The growing need for risk-based assessments of impacts and adaptation to regional climate change calls for the quantification of the likelihood of regional outcomes and the representation of their uncertainty. Moreover, our global water resources include energy, agricultural and environmental systems, which are linked together as well as to climate...