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Social protection transfers are the most widespread measures adopted to stabilize refugee households’ livelihoods and alleviate their food insecurity. This paper contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of different types of support on livelihoods and productivity outcomes of one of the largest refugee populations in Africa. Taking advantage of a unique panel dataset representative of the largest part of the 1.4 million people hosted in the Uganda refugees’ settlements, this paper investigates how different social protection interventions (cash and food) are effective in alleviating food insecurity and in contributing to beneficiaries’ self-reliance. The results show that the effectiveness of transfers depends on beneficiaries’ characteristics, on context specificity, and on the outcome assessed., FAO Document Repository: https://doi.org/10.4060/cc1838en

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

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the nexus between farm production diversification and household diet diversity in East Africa. Starting with a conceptual framework for the pathways from agriculture to nutrition, we use data collected from a sample of ultra-poor, labor constrained families living in five rural districts of Kenya. We find production diversification to be positively and significantly associated with household diet diversification, with poultry ownership most strongly correlated. These findings suggest that supporting investments in diversified livelihood systems in general and in small livestock assets such as poultry in particular are viable intervention classes to improve household food security and nutrition for very poor, marginalized smallholders., FAO Document Repository: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i6852e.pdf

This analysis examines the relationship between nonrenewable resource dependence, economic growth and income inequality. It uses a two-equation system in which the Gini index and GDP per capita are the dependent variables and the stock of nonrenewable resources as a share of national wealth -- i.e. resource dependence -- is the independent variable. Using a dataset that includes information on 43 countries from 1980 to 2012, this paper estimates several model specifications in order to check the robustness of the results under different assumptions and to account for income-group-related heterogeneity among countries. The baseline model provides strong evidence that natural resource dependence is negatively correlated with both per capita GDP and the Gini index; in other words, resource dependence is associated with lower income levels, but also with a more equal distribution of income. Interestingly, however, after controlling for country income group, the sign and magnitude of these relationships appear to become dependent on national-level structural characteristics. Among higher-income countries, greater nonrenewable natural resource dependence is associated with lower income inequality, while there is no statistically significant correlation with GDP per capita. Among the lower-income group, greater dependence on nonrenewable natural resources is associated with both higher levels of income inequality and lower per capita GDP. Further analysis focusing on a subsample of non-renewable resource rich countries confirms these findings.

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.