Browsing by Author "Filipski, Mateusz"

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    Economic impact of giving land to refugees
    Zhu, Heng; Gupta, Anubhab; Filipski, Mateusz; Valli, Jaakko; Gonzalez-Estrada, Ernesto; Taylor, J. Edward (Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, 2023-01-19)
    This paper adds to a sparse but growing literature on the economic costs and benefits of hosting refugees, including a unique policy of providing refugees with access to cultivable land. We construct a general equilibrium model from microsurvey data to simulate the spillover effects of giving land to refugees on income and production in the host-country economy surrounding a refugee settlement in Uganda. Reduced-form econometric analysis of land allocations at the refugee settlement, robust to several specifications, confirms the simulation finding that providing refugees with agricultural land significantly improves their welfare and self-reliance. Simulations reveal that refugee aid and land allocations generate positive income spillovers in the local economy out to a 15-km radius around the refugee settlement. Host-country households benefit significantly from the income spillovers that refugee assistance creates, and host-country agriculture is the largest beneficiary among production sectors.
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    Economic impact of nature-based tourism
    Gupta, Anubhab; Zhu, Heng; Bhammar, Hasita; Earley, Elisabeth; Filipski, Mateusz; Narain, Urvashi; Spencer, Phoebe; Whitney, Edward; Taylor, J. Edward (Public Library of Science, 2023-04)
    Protected areas (PAs) can help address biodiversity loss by promoting conservation while fostering economic development through sustainable tourism. Nature-based tourism can generate economic benefits for communities in and around PAs; however, its impacts do not lend themselves to conventional impact evaluation tools. We utilize a Monte Carlo simulation approach with econometric estimations using microdata to estimate the full economic impact of nature-based tourism on the economies surrounding three terrestrial and two marine PAs. Simulations suggest that nature-based tourism creates significant economic benefits for communities around PAs, including the poorest households, and many of these benefits are indirect, via income and production spillovers. An additional tourist increases annual real income in communities near the PAs by US$169-$2,400, significantly more than the average tourist's expenditure. Conversely, lost tourism due to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic costs of human-wildlife conflict have disproportionately large negative impacts on local incomes.
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    Is technology change good for cotton farmers? A local-economy analysis from the Tanzania Lake Zone
    Gupta, Anubhab; Kagin, Justin; Taylor, J. Edward; Filipski, Mateusz; Hlanze, Lindi; Foster, James (Oxford University Press, 2018-02-01)
    Technological change holds the potential to increase crop output as well as incomes of farmers and the communities in which they live. We carry out a local economy-wide impact evaluation of productivity-enhancing technological change amongst small-scale cotton producers in Tanzania’s Lake Zone. Our analysis reveals that demand constraints shift benefits from farmers to downstream processors, while limiting positive spillovers within local economies. Excess cotton gin capacity does the opposite. Interventions to ensure markets for increased output should complement strategies to raise productivity if a project’s goal is to improve welfare in farm households and the communities in which they live.
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    A local general-equilibrium emergency response modeling approach for sub-Saharan Africa
    Filipski, Mateusz; Gupta, Anubhab; Kagin, Justin; Husain, Arif; Grinspun, Alejandro; Caccavale, Oscar Maria; Daidone, Silvio; Giuffrida, Valerio; Greb, Friederike; Hooker, Joseph; Sandstrom, Susanna; Fletcher-Taylor, Julian; Taylor, J. Edward (Wiley, 2021-12-05)
    Swift response models are vital tools for emergency assistance agencies. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the lack of economic models for short-run policy relevant research to anticipate local impacts and design effective policy responses. The most direct effects of the pandemic and lockdown tended to be concentrated in urban areas; however, markets quickly transmitted impacts to rural areas as well as among poor and non-poor households. General equilibrium modeling is a tool of choice to capture indirect, spillover effects of exogenous shocks. This article describes an unusual micro general-equilibrium (GE) modeling approach that we developed to quickly simulate impacts of the pandemic and lockdowns on poor and non-poor rural and urban households across sub-Saharan Africa. Monte Carlo bootstrapping was used to construct four stylized regional GE models from 34 existing local economy-wide impact evaluation (LEWIE) models. Simulations revealed that the pandemic and policy responses to curtail its spread were likely to affect rural households at least as severely as urban households. Simulated income losses are greater in poor households in both urban and rural settings. These findings are relatively consistent across models spanning sub-Saharan Africa. Because COVID-19 impacts are so far-reaching, all types of economies experience downturns. Our research underlines the importance of modeling assumptions. We find total annualized impacts of around a 6-percent loss of GDP, smaller than estimates from single-country models that ignore price effects, such as SAM-multiplier models, but in line with The World Bank's baseline forecast of a 5.2% contraction in global GDP in 2020. The largest negative impacts are on poor rural households.