This paper analyzes the domestic and external drivers of local staple food prices in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data on domestic market prices of the five most consumed staple foods from 15 countries, this paper finds that external factors drive food price inflation, but domestic factors can...

We study how two aspects of food insecurity - caloric insufficiency and diet composition - are affected by aggregate economic fluctuations. The use of cross-country panel data allows us to adopt a global prospective on the identification of the macroeconomic determinants of food insecurity....

Over the past decade, India has seen a prolonged period of high inflation, to a large extent driven by persistently-high food inflation. This paper investigates the demand and supply factors behind the contribution of relative food inflation to headline CPI inflation. It concludes that in the...

We produce a social unrest risk index for 125 countries covering a period of 1996 to 2020. The risk of social unrest is based on the probability of unrest in the following year derived from a machine learning model drawing on over 340 indicators covering a wide range of macro-financial,...

This paper investigates the impact of domestic fuel price increases on export growth in a sample of 77 developing countries over the period 2000-2014. Using a fixed-effect estimator and the local projection approach, we find that an increase in domestic gasoline or diesel price adversely affects...

This paper provides a broad brush look at the impact of fluctuations in global food prices on domestic inflation in a large group of countries. For advanced economies, we find that these fluctuations have played a significant role over the period from 1960 to the present, but the impact has...

There is an extensive literature noting that high inflation can add to income inequality, and a parallel literature assessing the effect of rising food prices on the poor. This paper attempts to combine these strands by dividing inflation into food and nonfood inflation and assessing whether...

This paper analyzes food inflation trends in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from 2000 to 2016 using two novel datasets of disaggregated CPI baskets. Average food inflation is higher, more volatile, and similarly persistent as non-food non-fuel (NF/NF) inflation, especially in low-income countries...

The surge in energy and food prices, which was amplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has prompted a flurry of policy responses by countries during 2022. The aim of these policy responses was to mitigate social and economic impact of higher prices. In this paper we document announcements...

Financial crises are traditionally analyzed as purely economic phenomena. The political economy of financial booms and busts remains both under-emphasized and limited to isolated episodes. This paper examines the political economy of financial policy during ten of the most infamous financial...