This brief reviews results of applied research regarding the role of government in staple food markets in East and Southern Africa. The purpose of the brief is to draw lessons for Mozambique as it decides how to use the grain storage silos it has been building since 2009. The authors suggest that: � Mozambique is in an unusually strong position to take advantage of private sector activity to stabilize prices over time and space; � Additional investment in road and rail infrastructure, incentives, and institutions, would help bring down transaction costs and allow private action to further stabilize prices; � Additional stabilization, for those times when Mozambique has to rely on imports from the world market beyond what they normally make, could be obtained in a cost efficient manner using a financial reserve; and � If the government chooses also to maintain a public physical reserve, then several conditions (listed in the brief) are necessary for operating this in a manner that improves market performance. INTRODUCTION: The worldwide food price crisis of 2007 and 2008 focused the world’s attention on issues of staple food availability and

Trade preferences are a key element in industrial countries efforts to assist the integration of the least developed countries (LDCs) into the world economy. This paper provides an initial evaluation of the impact of the EU's recently introduced Everything but Arms (EBA) initiative on the products currently exported by the LDCs. It shows that the changes introduced by the EBA in 2001 are relatively minor for the currently exported products, primarily because over 99 percent of EU imports from the LDCs are in products which the EU had already liberalised and the complete removal of barriers to the key remaining products, rice, sugar and bananas has been delayed. The paper proceeds to look at the role EU preferences to LDCs in general have been playing and could play in assisting the integration of the LDCs. It shows that there is considerable variation across countries in the potential impact that EU preferences can have given current export structures. There is a group of the LDCs for whom EU trade preferences on existing exports are not significant since these exports are mainly of products where the MFN duty is zero. Export diversification is the key issue for these countries. For other LDCs, EU preferences have the potential to provide a more substantial impact on trade. However, the paper shows that only 50 percent of EU imports from non-ACP LDCs which are eligible actually request preferential access to the EU. The prime suspect for this low level of utilization are the rules of origin, both the restrictiveness of the requirements on sufficient processing and the costs and difficulties of providing the necessary documentation. More simple rules of origin are likely to enhance the impact of EU trade preferences both in terms of improving market access and in stimula...

“Rule of Law, Transparency and Corruption ” was found to be positively associated with HIV prevalence across all African countries

This study suggests that geographical location and religion predict HIV prevalence rather than governance.

Identifying the Community Structure of the International-Trade Multi Network

   

 Abstract: We study the community structure of the multi-network of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992-2003 period. We compare structures across commodities and time by means of the normalized mutual information index (NMI). We also compare them with exogenous community structures induced by geographical distances and regional trade agreements. We find that commodity-specific community structures are very heterogeneous and much more fragmented than that characterizing the aggregate ITN. This shows that the aggregate properties of the ITN may result (and be very different) from the aggregation of very diverse commodity-specific layers of the multi network. We also show that commodity-specific community structures, especially those related to the chemical sector, are becoming more and more similar to the aggregate one. Finally, our findings suggest that geographical distance is much more correlated with the observed community structure than RTAs. This result strengthens previous findings from the empirical literature on trade. 

 

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  ... community. Interestingly, these countries are often those were civil wars or in general social instability are most likely to be (or to have been) present. This is the case of Mozambique, Zambia, Angola, Guinea, Myanmar and Central Asian countries. It is unlikely that these countries do not participate in arms trade, but it is not surprising that our data do not r ...