A geospatial analysis of market integration: the case of the 2004/5 food crisis in Niger

Abstract

Food prices are an important component of the food security equation. Stable prices promote food security, whereas price instability and volatility can contribute to and exacerbate food crises. Understanding market integration, or the co-movement of prices between different markets, can therefore provide important insights into food security and threats to it. The value of a geographic perspective is illustrated through an examination of market integration with spatial analysis. Results from an analysis of the 2004/5 food crisis in Niger indicate that market integration in Niger tends to be local and deteriorates rapidly during shocks or periods of crisis.

A Review of Food Security and the Potentials to Develop Spatially Informed Food Policies in Bangladesh

“…These changes may have occurred due to changes in consumption patterns of different types of foods and rural-urban demographic dissimilarities in the country during the period. Access to infrastructure resources, particularly total delivery distances of food within a region, the location of growth centers, and access to electricity (Scaramozzino 2006;Shin 2010) may affect food access in Bangladesh. Except for the Chittagong Hill Tracts and Coastal Region of Bangladesh, the national average travel time to the nearest growth center is approximately 1 h (GoB and WFP 2004).…”

“…Both flooding and cyclones are likely to increase with future climate change and have spatially differing risk profiles associated with all components of food security, production, distribution, housing, and health. Some of these interactions are well understood (Shin 2010;Sajjad et al 2014;Hadgu et al 2009;Shi and Tao 2014); others lack evidence, which may successively reduce uncertainties in modeling when it becomes available through research. This research is crucial to build and apply quantitative models that use risk appraisals to test policy options for diverse future scenarios in a country.…”

The short-term impact of price shocks on food security-Evidence from urban and rural Ethiopia

“…Nevertheless, prices at individual markets may exhibit substantial fluctuations due to local demand and supply factors. Although regional trade may reduce price differences, market integration in developing countries is not perfect and may depend on temporary and geographical conditions (Shin 2010). Table 1 displays the temporal and spatial variability of grain prices: Price differences between markets are much larger than price changes over time, indicating weak market integration and high transaction and transportation costs.…”

A Bayesian spatio-temporal analysis of markets during the Finnish 1860s famine

“…Studer, 2008;Chilosi et al, 2013;Voutilainen et al, 2020), especially during famines (e.g. Shin, 2010) leaving market behavior under such environments greatly understudied. To exploit the inherent spatio-temporal dependency structure of the regional markets, here we generalize the conventional ECM to a spatial Bayesian framework and apply it to study grain markets during the Finnish 1860s famine, studied previously by Ó Gráda (2001).…”

“…Most famines experienced during the past hundred years have been marked by disintegration and balkanization of market relationships (e.g. Shin, 2010;Ó Gráda, 2015), excessive price volatility (Araujo Bonjean and Simonet, 2016;Ravallion, 1987;Quddus and Becker, 2000;Devereux and Tiba, 2007;Garenne, 2007), lack of accurate market information, and politically motivated hampering of market access (e.g. Olsson, 1993;de Waal, 1993;Macrae and Zwi, 1992;Marcus, 2003;Ó Gráda, 2015).…”