Browsing by Author "Gupta, Anubhab"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
  • Thumbnail Image
    Economic costs of extreme heat on groundnut production in the Senegal Groundnut Basin
    Sembene, Maguette (Virginia Tech, 2023-09-01)
    Groundnut production is vital to the Senegalese agricultural economy, particularly in the Groundnut Basin. However the region is increasingly affected by climate change and associated rising temperatures. This study investigates long-term changes in the frequency of extreme temperatures in the Groundnut Basin and the impact of extreme temperatures on groundnut production. The current economic costs of extreme temperatures on groundnut farmers and potential future additional economic costs associated with climate change are then calculated. The study uses a two-year panel dataset from 1,123 households in the Groundnut Basin and weather data from meteorological stations and the ERA5 climate database. Results identify a significant increasing trend in extreme temperatures across the Groundnut Basin and a negative relationship between extreme temperatures and groundnut yield. This leads to financial losses for farmers, with adaptation strategies such as input level adjustments providing partial mitigation. Future projections indicate further increases in extreme heat degrees days, resulting in significant yield losses by 2050. But the implications of extreme heat also extend beyond agriculture, affecting human habitation and exacerbating societal inequalities. The findings highlight the potential long-term effects of increasing temperatures on agricultural practices in the Groundnut Basin and underscore the need for adaptation and mitigation strategies to cope with the impacts of climate change.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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-$2,400, significantly more than the average tourist's expenditure. Conversely, lost tourism due to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic costs of human-wildlife conflict have disproportionately large negative impacts on local incomes.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Economic Impacts of the COVID−19 Lockdown in a Remittance‐Dependent Region
    Gupta, Anubhab; Zhu, Heng; Doan, Miki Khanh; Michuda, Aleksandr; Majumder, Binoy (Wiley, 2020)
    The economic impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns on poor and vulnerable households living in rural areas of developing countries are not well understood due to a lack of detailed micro-survey data at the household level. Utilizing weekly financial transaction data collected from households residing in a rural region of India, we estimate the impacts of India’s COVID-19 lockdown on household income, food security, welfare, and access to local loan markets. A large portion of households living in our study region is reliant on remittances from migrants to sustain their livelihoods. Our analysis reveals that in the month immediately after India’s lockdown announcement, weekly household local income fell by INR 1,022 (US$ 13.5), an 88% drop compared to the long-term average with another 63% reduction in remittance. In response to the massive loss in earnings, households substantially reduced meal portions and consumed fewer food items. Impacts were heterogeneous; households in lower income quantiles lost a higher percentage of their income and expenditures, but government food aid slightly mitigated the negative impacts. We also find an increase in the effective interest rate of local borrowing in cash and a higher demand for in-kind loans, which are likely to have an adverse effect on households who rely on such services. The results from this paper have immediate relevance to policymakers considering additional lockdowns as the COVID-19 pandemic resurges around the globe and to governments thinking about responses to future pandemics that may occur.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Human Capital in Appalachia: An Analysis of Vulnerability, Resilience, and Skills in Preparation of a Greener Economy
    Pierce, Timothy Samuel (Virginia Tech, 2022-09-08)
    This thesis constructs a novel resilience index and a comparative advantage measure of professional skills to enhance our understanding of economic resilience in Appalachian counties that are vulnerable to the transition to a greener economy. The index-based results indicate that resilience is clustered throughout the region and strongly related to local labor market demand for the skills required to complete non-routine cognitive tasks. Resilient labor markets hold a comparative advantage over their less resilient counterparts in twelve skills. These skills are highly prevalent in growing and emerging occupations and strongly related to resilience in the existing literature on regional economic shocks. This thesis also develops a database that enables future researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders to geospatially analyze skill prevalence at a county level and make informed and proactive decisions in the face of a changing economy.
  • Thumbnail Image
    International Agricultural Trade Costs and Non-Tariff Measures
    Karagulle, Yunus Emre (Virginia Tech, 2024-08-22)
    This dissertation investigates how agricultural trade frictions, such as tariffs and non-tariff measures (NTMs), impact trade competitiveness and globalization in the agricultural sector. The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter argues that agricultural trade cost evolution differs from other sectors due to frequent regulations, standards, and the unique physical characteristics of agricultural products. We measure agricultural trade costs in the 21st century using a three-step estimation procedure based on structural gravity models. Our findings reveal unequal integration of world economies into agricultural trade, with heterogeneous trade costs among countries. Only high-income countries have achieved lower agricultural trade costs between 2001 to 2018. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that while standard country characteristics are important, trade policy tools such as agricultural tariff rates, trade agreements, provisions in deep trade agreements, as well as logistics and infrastructure systems, significantly impact agricultural trade costs. In the second chapter, we assess the impact of non-tariff measures on U.S. agricultural exports as these measures have become increasingly important in global agricultural trade. Despite a vast empirical literature, the universe of NTMs is large and diverse, making it difficult to understand trade and export survival in the face of restrictive non-tariff regulatory measures. Moreover, the sheer number of NTMs collected and notified makes it difficult for researchers to disentangle and quantify measures that are burdensome for exporters from those that are largely inconsequential. In this chapter, we follow a different approach and create an NTM dataset consisting of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures and technical barriers to trade (TBT) measures from the National Trade Estimate Report of the United States Trade Representative. Using this dataset, we quantify the impact of SPS and TBT measures on U.S. agricultural exports. We find that the existence of NTM measures reduces U.S. agricultural exports by 34%, an effect equivalent to an 8% ad-valorem tariff. Furthermore, we find that these NTMs do not increase the probability of U.S. agricultural exports stopping. In the third chapter, we employ a recently developed method to estimate the border effects of the USA and competitive agricultural exporters to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We use recent advances in structural gravity modeling to estimate international border effects, incorporating intra-national trade. We present the differences in border effects relative to USA exports to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in ad valorem equivalent (AVE) tariffs. Our findings reveal substantial differences in USA agricultural border effects between relatively more integrated NAFTA partners and the SSA region, equivalent to a 43% AVE tariff, while for competitive suppliers, these AVEs range from 3% to 46%. The chapter concludes with a general equilibrium experiment stimulating a 20% reduction in border effects. Results indicate significant increases in SSA's imports, as well as welfare gains for both SSA and partner countries subject to border liberalization, with larger effects observed in SSA countries.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Short-term effects of India’s demonetization on the rural poor
    Zhu, Heng; Gupta, Anubhab; Majumder, Binoy; Steinbach, Sandro (Elsevier, 2018-09)
    This paper analyzes the short-run responses of poor rural households to India’s demonetization in 2016. We estimate an economic loss of 15.5% over the two months post demonetization and discuss a range of strategies that the households adopted to exchange their banned currency-denominations.
  • Thumbnail Image
    The Cost of Inaction: Impacts of WFP Assistance Shortfalls on Food Security Outcomes in Somalia
    Kagin, Justin; Kumar, Deepak; Gupta, Anubhab; Taylor, J. Edward; Amondi, Edith; Clough, Alice; Gualtieri, Alberto; Krishnaswamy, Siddarth; Leaduma, Amos; Monetta, Cinzia; Nanayakkara, Laksiri; Mesa, Joshua (WFP/Geneva Costopulos, 2024)
    Millions of Somalis face hunger and malnutrition due to ongoing conflict and climate disruptions. Somalia’s food systems are strained by a combination of weather shocks, civil conflicts, environmental distress, increasing food costs, and limited infrastructure and investments (WFP Somalia Country Brief 2023). The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has been working extensively in Somalia, expanding its humanitarian activities in recent years in response to the severe drought of 2020-2023. In January 2023 alone, it distributed USD 45 million in cash and 7.1 MT in in-kind food assistance to 4.1 million people in the country, including vulnerable internally displaced persons (IDPs) and resident (non-IDPs) households. The soaring demand for humanitarian assistance is straining an already underfunded WFP. WFP estimated a funding gap of USD 378 million from November 2023 to April 2024, only providing food assistance to less than half of those people most in need (WFP Emergency-Somalia website).
  • Thumbnail Image
    The Cost of Inaction: Impacts of WFP Refugee Assistance Shortfalls on Food Security Outcomes in Uganda
    Kagin, Justin; Qi, Tao; Kumar, Deepak; Gupta, Anubhab; Taylor, J. Edward; Amondi, Edith; Clough, Alice; Gualtieri, Alberto; Krishnaswamy, Siddarth; Leaduma, Amos; Monetta, Cinzia; Alvarado, Wendy; Kyanjo, Joseph; Likicho, Lilian (WFP/Badre Bahaji, 2024)
    Uganda hosts the largest refugee population in Africa, which quadrupled from 390,000 to 1.6 million from 2014 to 2024. Most of these refugees are women, children, and older persons fleeing conflict in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, or Sudan. In 2023, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) provided food assistance to 1.4 million of these refugees. It gave a 60% food ration to those deemed to be highly vulnerable and a 30% ration to the moderately vulnerable, while moving the least vulnerable refugees off monthly food assistance and connecting them to long-term livelihood opportunities. All new arrivals received a 100% food ration for the first three months. Most WFP food assistance—61% in 2023—was in the form of Cash-Based Transfers (CBT). A soaring demand for humanitarian assistance is straining an already underfunded WFP, which faced a funding gap of $110 million to sustain emergency operations through 2023 (WFP 2023, WFP 2024).