No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all Sub-Saharan economies through a multitude of impact channels. The study determines the medium-term macroeconomic outcomes of the pandemic on the Kenyan economy and links the results with a detailed food security and nutrition microsimulation module. It thus evaluates the effectiveness of the adopted government measures to reduce the negative outcomes on food security and to enable economic recovery at aggregate, sectoral and household levels. Through income support measures, the food sector and food demand partially recover. However, 1.3% of households still fall below calorie intake thresholds, many of which are in rural areas. Results also indicate that the state of food security in Kenya remains vulnerable to the evolution of the pandemic abroad.

In the summer of 2014 Russia imposed a ban on most agri-food products from countries enforcing Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia. We use a specific factors computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the short-run impact of this retaliatory policy. The baseline is carefully designed to isolate the impacts of the ban on the European Union (EU), Russia itself and a selection of key trade partners. The modelling of the ban follows a novel approach, where it is treated as a loss of established trade preferences via reductions in consumer utility in the Armington import function. Not surprisingly, the results indicate that Russia bears the highest income loss (about €3.4 billion) while the EU recovers part of its lost trade through expansion of exports to other markets. An ex-post comparison between simulation results and observed trade data reveals the model predictions to be broadly accurate, thereby validating the robustness of the modelling approach.

Highlights Assessment of food waste reduction impact needs to include economic and biophysical indicators. Economy-wide models as proposed in this paper can account for all market and non-market impacts of reducing food waste. Reducing households' food waste increases savings; it decreases agri-food production and to a minor extent GDP. Environmental indicators are improving as EU land use, water abstraction and greenhouse gas emissions decline.

The concept of 'bioeconomy' is gathering momentum in European Union (EU) policy circles as a sustainable model of growth to reconcile continued wealth generation and employment with bio-based sustainable resource usage. Unfortunately, in the literature an economy-wide quantitative assessment covering the full diversity of this sector is lacking due to relatively poor data availability for disaggregated bio-based activities. This research represents a first step by employing social accounting matrices (SAMs) for each EU27 member encompassing a highly disaggregated treatment of traditional 'bio-based' agricultural and food activities, as well as additional identifiable bioeconomic activities from the national accounts data. Employing backward-linkage (BL), forward-linkage (FL) and employment multipliers, the aim is to profile and assess comparative structural patterns both across bioeconomic sectors and EU Member States. The results indicate six clusters of EU member countries with homogeneous bioeconomy structures. Within cluster statistical tests reveal a high tendency toward 'backward orientation' or demand driven wealth generation, whilst inter-cluster statistical comparisons by bio-based sector show only a moderate degree of heterogeneous BL wealth generation and, with the exception of only two sectors, a uniformly homogeneous degree of FL wealth generation. With the exception of forestry, fishing and wood activities, bio-based employment generation prospects are below non bioeconomy activities. Finally, milk and dairy are established as 'key sectors'.