Purpose Prior studies have found evidence for the role of political instability on foreign divestment (FD) where a high level of instability encourages FD decisions. Therefore, this paper aims to examine how the food security level explains the linkage between political instability and FD. Design/methodology/approach The current study adopts the system generalised method of moment (GMM) to achieve accurate and reliable empirical evidence for 60 developing countries in the period 2011 to 2020. Findings The results demonstrated a negative and significant relationship between political instability and FD on food security. This suggests that political instability’s impact on divestment tends to be lower in countries with better levels of food security. Other controlled variables, such as economic growth, human capital and trade openness, also have a negative effect on FD, discouraging FD. Practical implications As a result, policymakers could take steps to ensure that food security levels reach acceptable levels, as food security has been linked to a country’s political stability. Originality/value To the authors limited knowledge, no studies have looked at the relationship between political instability and food security in determining a country’s FD. Our study aims to analyse this issue because the current global crisis, which is being caused by high food prices, will push millions of more people into severe poverty and exacerbate hunger and malnutrition

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Under the US-China trade war, several countries could gain the most from the tension. This study aims to investigate how the US-China trade war affects the exports of major trading partners of the US and China, which are also competing with China and the US for the same markets of the US and China, respectively. Ten selected major exporting countries are utilized as the sample of this study. The results of Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) show that the US-China trade war has a significant effect on exports of US’s and China’s top ten trading partners. Therefore, while the US and China might be struggling to find new avenues for their exports, some countries can reap the positive side-effect of the trade war, which raged between the US and China.

This paper examines the impact of population growth on food security given the level of biofuel using a panel data of 57 developing countries. Adopting generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, interaction term between population growth and biofuel has a negative and significant impact on food security. This implies that as the population grows, the effects of biofuel on food security worsen. Additionally, we look at the related problem for each of the four dimensions of food security—availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability. In doing so, this study supports the earlier finding that the impact of biofuel on food security tends to worsen as a country's population grows across all four aspects of food security. Thus, this study points to many policy implications for dealing with the effect of biofuel production on food security in light of population expansion.