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Ensuring quality to gain access to global markets : a reform toolkit
In a modern world with rapidly growing international trade, countries compete less based on the availability of natural resources, geographical advantages, and lower labor costs and more on factors related to firms' ability to enter and compete in new markets. One such factor is the ability to demonstrate the quality and safety of goods and services expected by consumers and confirm compliance with international standards. To assure such compliance, a sound quality infrastructure (QI) ecosystem is essential. Jointly developed by the World Bank Group and the National Metrology Institute of Germany, this guide is designed to help development partners and governments analyze a country's quality infrastructure ecosystems and provide recommendations to design and implement reforms and enhance the capacity of their QI institutions.
Book
Opportunities and challenges in developing a whole-of-government national food and nutrition policy: lessons from Australia’s National Food Plan
The present article tracks the development of the Australian National Food Plan as a 'whole of government' food policy that aimed to integrate elements of nutrition and sustainability alongside economic objectives.
The article uses policy analysis to explore the processes of consultation and stakeholder involvement in the development of the National Food Plan, focusing on actors from the sectors of industry, civil society and government. Existing documentation and submissions to the Plan were used as data sources. Models of health policy analysis and policy streams were employed to analyse policy development processes.
Australia.
Australian food policy stakeholders.
The development of the Plan was influenced by powerful industry groups and stakeholder engagement by the lead ministry favoured the involvement of actors representing the food and agriculture industries. Public health nutrition and civil society relied on traditional methods of policy influence, and the public health nutrition movement failed to develop a unified cross-sector alliance, while the private sector engaged in different ways and presented a united front. The National Food Plan failed to deliver an integrated food policy for Australia. Nutrition and sustainability were effectively sidelined due to the focus on global food production and positioning Australia as a food 'superpower' that could take advantage of the anticipated 'dining boom' as incomes rose in the Asia-Pacific region.
New forms of industry influence are emerging in the food policy arena and public health nutrition will need to adopt new approaches to influencing public policy.
Journal Article
Governing through markets
In recent years a startling policy innovation has emerged within global and domestic environmental governance: certification systems that promote socially responsible business practices by turning to the market, rather than the state, for rule-making authority. This book documents five cases in which the Forest Stewardship Council, a forest certification program backed by leading environmental groups, has competed with industry and landowner-sponsored certification systems for legitimacy.The authors compare the politics behind forest certification in five countries. They reflect on why there are differences regionally, discuss the impact the Forest Stewardship Council has had on other certification programs, and assess the ability of private forest certification to address global forest deterioration.
eBook
CASH AND THE ECONOMY
We analyze a unique episode in the history of monetary economics, the 2016 Indian “demonetization.” This policy made 86% of cash in circulation illegal tender overnight, with new notes gradually introduced over the next several months. We present a model of demonetization where agents hold cash both to satisfy a cash-in-advance constraint and for tax evasion purposes. We test the predictions of the model in the cross-section of Indian districts using several novel data sets including: the geographic distribution of demonetized and new notes for causal inference; night light activity and employment surveys to measure economic activity including in the informal sector; debit/credit cards and e-wallet transactions data; and banking data on deposit and credit growth. Districts experiencing more severe demonetization had relative reductions in economic activity, faster adoption of alternative payment technologies, and lower bank credit growth. The cross-sectional responses cumulate to a contraction in aggregate employment and night lights–based output due to the the cash shortage of at least 2 percentage points and of bank credit of 2 percentage points in 2016Q4 relative to their counterfactual paths, effects that dissipate over the next few months. Our analysis rejects monetary neutrality using a large-scale natural experiment, something that is still rare in the vast literature on the effects of monetary policy.
Journal Article
The potential of neglected and underutilized species for improving diets and nutrition
Why have our food systems come to rely on such a narrow range of plant species of limited nutritional value? Today three staple crops (rice, maize and wheat) account for more than 50% of calories consumed while we continue to disregard the huge diversity of nutrient-rich plant species utilized by humanity throughout our history. The reasons for this situation are complex and challenging. Creative approaches are required to ensure greater integration of these plant species in agriculture and food systems, and ultimately greater food diversity on our plates and in our diets. This paper presents an overview of the nutritional value of select neglected and underutilized species (NUS) before describing in detail the work undertaken in four mega-diverse countries—Brazil, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Turkey—to increase the knowledge, appreciation, awareness and utilization of this nutrient-rich biodiversity encompassing both orphan crops and wild edible plant species. The paper highlights the novel and ingenious approaches these countries have used to prioritize a rich diversity of NUS for healthier diets and improved nutrition, and how this knowledge has been used to mainstream these plant species into production and consumption systems, including linking NUS to school meals and public food procurement, dietary guidelines and sustainable gastronomy. The paper concludes with some perspectives on the way forward for NUS and the community working on them (including researchers, universities and government agencies, national ministries, municipalities, producers, and civil society) in meeting the challenges of malnutrition and environmental sustainability in the 2030 sustainable development context.
Journal Article
When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism
How does spatial scale affect support for public policy? Does supporting housing citywide but “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) help explain why housing has become increasingly difficult to build in once-affordable cities? I use two original surveys to measure how support for new housing varies between the city scale and neighborhood scale. Together, an exit poll of 1,660 voters during the 2015 San Francisco election and a national survey of over 3,000 respondents provide the first experimental measurements of NIMBYism. While homeowners are sensitive to housing’s proximity, renters typically do not express NIMBYism. However, in high-rent cities, renters demonstrate NIMBYism on par with homeowners, despite continuing to support large increases in the housing supply citywide. These scale-dependent preferences not only help explain the deepening affordability crisis, but show how institutions can undersupply even widely supported public goods. When preferences are scale dependent, the scale of decision-making matters.
Journal Article
Fiscal Volatility Shocks and Economic Activity
We study how unexpected changes in uncertainty about fiscal policy affect economic activity. First, we estimate tax and spending processes for the United States with time-varying volatility to uncover evidence of time-varying volatility. Second, we estimate a VAR for the US economy using the time-varying volatility found in the previous step. Third, we feed the tax and spending processes into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. Both in the VAR and in the model, we find that unexpected changes in fiscal volatility shocks can have a sizable adverse effect on economic activity. An endogenous increase in markups is a key mechanism.
Journal Article
Waging War on Poverty: Poverty Trends Using a Historical Supplemental Poverty Measure
Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the March Current Population Survey, we provide poverty estimates for 1967 to 2012 based on a historical supplemental poverty measure (SPM). During this period, poverty, as officially measured, has stagnated. However, the official poverty measure (OPM) does not account for the effect of near-cash transfers on the financial resources available to families, an important omission since such transfers have become an increasingly important part of government antipoverty policy. Applying the historical SPM, which does count such transfers, we find that trends in poverty have been more favorable than the OPM suggests and that government policies have played an important and growing role in reducing poverty—a role that is not evident when the OPM is used to assess poverty. We also find that government programs have played a particularly important role in alleviating child poverty and deep poverty, especially during economic downturns.
Journal Article
Repairing The Broken Market For Antibiotic Innovation
Multidrug-resistant bacterial diseases pose serious and growing threats to human health. While innovation is important to all areas of health research, it is uniquely important in antibiotics. Resistance destroys the fruit of prior research, making it necessary to constantly innovate to avoid falling back into a pre-antibiotic era. But investment is declining in antibiotics, driven by competition from older antibiotics, the cost and uncertainty of the development process, and limited reimbursement incentives. Good public health practices curb inappropriate antibiotic use, making return on investment challenging in payment systems based on sales volume. We assess the impact of recent initiatives to improve antibiotic innovation, reflecting experience with all sixty-seven new molecular entity antibiotics approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 1980. Our analysis incorporates data and insights derived from several multistakeholder initiatives under way involving governments and the private sector on both sides of the Atlantic. We propose three specific reforms that could revitalize innovations that protect public health, while promoting long-term sustainability: increased incentives for antibiotic research and development, surveillance, and stewardship; greater targeting of incentives to high-priority public health needs, including reimbursement that is delinked from volume of drug use; and enhanced global collaboration, including a global treaty.
Journal Article
Sustainable Power Generation in Europe: A Panel Data Analysis of the Effects of Market and Environmental Regulations
Climate change and greenhouse gas emissions have become increasingly more pressing environmental concerns in European policy agenda. Environmental energy efficiency (EEE) has been identified as one of the main tools for fostering the sustainable energy transition. The current policy debate on the organization of energy markets focuses both on promoting higher market efficiency and environmentally sustainable production. Consequently, in this study we analyze the impact of market and environmental regulatory tools on EEE for the electricity sector of European countries using an innovative econometric technique. We conduct an empirical analysis of the dynamics of the technical and environmental performance of the electricity sectors of 18 EU countries during 2006–2014. The contribution of the present study to the literature is threefold. First, we propose a redefinition of the technology set and a new index for the productivity change feasible and consistent with the presence of bad output. Second, we decompose the productivity changes in the two main components (the efficiency gains and the technological progress), and we measure the co-joint effects of the stringency of both market and environmental policies on these two main drivers of EEE. Third, we model country heterogeneity using a Bayesian shrinkage estimator to avoid the estimates’ poolability assumption. Results suggest that the dynamic of the effects of regulations on EEE depend on the policy instrument used. Finally, the country-specific results highlight the effects of the interactions among different policy instruments and they can be used by policy makers to balance the stringency of market regulation according to the level of environmental regulation.
Journal Article