570 Biowissenschaften; Biologie
Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Food security (1)
- International unions (1)
- Regional cooperation (1)
- West Africa (1)
- economics (1)
- environmental health (1)
- geography (1)
Institute
Many phenomena of high relevance for economic development such as human capital, geography and climate vary considerably within countries as well as between them. Yet, global data sets of economic output are typically available at the national level only, thereby limiting the accuracy and precision of insights gained through empirical analyses. Recent work has used interpolation and downscaling to yield estimates of sub-national economic output at a global scale, but respective data sets based on official, reported values only are lacking. We here present DOSE — the MCC-PIK Database Of Sub-national Economic Output. DOSE contains harmonised data on reported economic output from 1,661 sub-national regions across 83 countries from 1960 to 2020. To avoid interpolation, values are assembled from numerous statistical agencies, yearbooks and the literature and harmonised for both aggregate and sectoral output. Moreover, we provide temporally- and spatially-consistent data for regional boundaries, enabling matching with geo-spatial data such as climate observations. DOSE provides the opportunity for detailed analyses of economic development at the subnational level, consistent with reported values.
With the onset of the global food crisis, the discussion about the use and misuse of agricultural market interventions regained academic attention. As a result of economies of scale, centralized policy implementation at the regional level has the potential to reduce the budgetary costs of policies. Borrowing from the literature on international unions and international policy coordination, we develop a conceptual framework to analyze when regional policy implementation makes sense. This is the case whenever spill-overs from centralization are large and policy preferences, driven by country-specific characteristics, are homogeneous. Subsequently, we examine the advantageousness of centralized policy implementation for the West African region regarding the most common food security policies. We show that centralization of trade policies and emergency food reserves is beneficial, while buffer stocks, safety net policies, and producer support policies should be implemented at the national level.