Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Political Unrest

Abstract

Do food prices cause political unrest? Throughout history, riots appear to have frequently broken out as a consequence of high food prices. This paper studies the impact of food prices on food-related political unrest using monthly data at the international level. Because food prices and political unrest are jointly determined, the number of natural disasters in a given month is used in an attempt to identify the causal relationship ‡owing from food prices and political unrest unrest. Empirical results indicate that between January 1990 and January 2011, food price increases appear to have led to increased political unrest, whereas food price volatility has been associated with decreases in political unrest. These …ndings are consistent with those of the applied microeconomics literature on the welfare impacts of food prices.

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