A propitiously timed household survey carried out in Mozambique over the period 2008/2009 permits us to study the relationship between shifts in food prices and child nutrition status in a low income setting. We focus on weight-for-height and weight-for-age in different survey quarters characterized by very different food price inflation rates. Using propensity score matching techniques, we find that these nutrition measures, which are sensitive in the short run, improve significantly in the fourth quarter of the survey, when the inflation rate for basic food products is low, compared to the first semester or three quarters, when food price inflation was generally high. The prevalence of underweight, in particular, falls by about 40 percent. We conclude that the best available evidence points to food penury, driven by the food and fuel price crisis combined with a short agricultural production year, as substantially increasing malnutrition amongst under-five children in Mozambique.

Changes in the relative prices of commodities consumed in different shares across income groups are known to influence real measures of inequality. Using household budget survey and price data in Mozambique from 2002/03 and 2008/09, we show that accounting for the relative price changes driven by the food and fuel price crisis substantially increases real inequality, by about two Gini points. This result is obtained by computing a price deflator that explicitly reflects divergent price dynamics of different product categories. The difference in measured inequality is larger in regions where consumers are more dependent on imported food, particularly those in urban and southern areas of the country. Since the main factors driving this result prevail in other countries, the approach points to the likelihood of widespread underestimation of inequality as a result of the secular increase in basic food prices observed since about 2000, and sharp increases experienced during the 2007-09 food and fuel price crisis.This original study has been extensively revised, thus it is recommended to use the revised version, WP2015/032, as the study to engage with and to cite.

We explore a novel first-order dominance (FOD) approach to poverty mapping and compare its properties to small-area estimation. The FOD approach uses census data directly, is straightforward to implement, is multidimensional allowing for a broad conception of welfare and accounts rigorously for welfare distributions in both levels and trends. An application to Mozambique highlights the value of the approach, including its advantages in the monitoring and evaluation of public expenditures. We conclude that the FOD approach to poverty mapping constitutes a useful addition to the toolkit of policy analysts.

This study has been prepared within the project on Inclusive growth in Mozambique-scaling-up research and capacity implemented in collaboration between UNU-WIDER, University of Copenhagen, University Eduardo Mondlane, and the Mozambican Ministry of Economics and Finance. The project is financed through specific programme contributions by the governments of Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

This study aims at providing new insights into poverty, vulnerability, and their correlates in Mozambique, applying synthetic panels techniques and expanding on earlier analyses. Our results suggest that there is a high degree of poverty immobility, especially in rural areas in the northern and central regions and for low‐educated people. Even nonpoor households are at a high risk to vulnerability, and this risk does not differ much for households in urban/rural areas or in different regions or with different education levels. We also observe that a large portion of the population remains in or out of poverty over the entire year, with a higher percentage of individuals moving into poverty between the dry and the rainy seasons and a nonnegligible proportion of vulnerable people not managing to revert to nonpoverty in the subsequent dry season. Overall, these findings are highly relevant for designing anti‐poverty policies and strategies, as they provide information on intra‐year shocks and on some of the characteristics related to upward and downward mobility over longer time spans, also with regard to the recent Covid‐19 and other recent shocks suffered by the country.