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This paper uncovers the mechanisms shaping the impact of the public work component of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on beneficiaries and communities’ food security and vulnerability to various shocks. From a policy perspective, the empirical findings recommend explicitly integrating environmental and climate considerations to design social protection programmes which target poor agricultural households highly vulnerable to weather shocks., FAO Document Repository: https://doi.org/10.4060/cc0824en

In many developing countries the adoption of climate sustainable practices is hindered by resource and risk barriers. This paper assesses the interactions between participation in Malawi’s largest public works programme, the Malawi Social Action Fund (MASAF), and three widely promoted climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices. The underlying hypotheses to be tested are: (a) that participation in the MASAF programme reduce both the budget and the risk constraints to the adoption of sustainable management practices; and (b) the joint treatment effect of MASAF and CSA increases household farms’ productivity and welfare. Drawing on three waves of national panel household survey data, we find that participation in MASAF significantly increases the probability that farm households adopt all the CSA practices considered for this study., FAO Document Repository: https://doi.org/10.4060/cb3649en

Modeling crude oil volatility is of substantial interest for both energy researchers and policy makers. This paper aims to investigate the impact of the U.S. monetary policy on crude oil future price (COFP) volatility. By means of the recently proposed generalized autoregressive conditional hetroskedasticity mixed data sampling (GARCH-MIDAS) model, a proxy of the U.S. monetary policy is included into the COFP volatility equation, alongside with other macroeconomic determinants. Strong evidence that an expansionary monetary policy is associated with an increase of the COFP volatility is found. In particular, an expansionary (restrictive) variation in monetary policy anticipates a positive (negative) variation in COFP volatility. Furthermore, an out of sample forecasting procedure shows that the estimated GARCH-MIDAS model has a superior predictive ability with respect to that of the GARCH(1,1), when the U.S. monetary policy exhibits severe changes in the run-up period.