Emanuele Ferrari | European Commission Joint Research Centre (original) (raw)

Working Paper by Emanuele Ferrari

Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, 2014

ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to develop a coherent approach to describe the agri-food ... more ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to develop a coherent approach to describe the agri-food and other bio-based accounts in the European Union. The paper presents a case study of Spain based on a Social Accounting Matrix with a highly disaggregated agricultural account for the year 2000. The analysis of multipliers allows identifying backward and forward linkages, key sectors, and employment multipliers of the Spanish agri-food and other bio-based accounts. This analysis helps us to better understand the extended agri-food account's economic linkages. No primary agricultural account emerges as key for the Spanish economy, while the production of (renewable) energy appears the only key sector related to agri-food and other bio-based accounts. Livestock and related bio-based products present the highest backward linkages, that is, they have significant diffusion effects of activity to the whole economy.

Papers by Emanuele Ferrari

Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2016

In the summer of 2014 Russia imposed a ban on most agri-food products from countries enforcing Uk... more In the summer of 2014 Russia imposed a ban on most agri-food products from countries enforcing Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia. We use a specific factors computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the short-run impact of this retaliatory policy. The baseline is carefully designed to isolate the impacts of the ban on the European Union (EU), Russia itself and a selection of key trade partners. The modelling of the ban follows a novel approach, where it is treated as a loss of established trade preferences via reductions in consumer utility in the Armington import function. Not surprisingly, the results indicate that Russia bears the highest income loss (about €3.4 billion) while the EU recovers part of its lost trade through expansion of exports to other markets. An ex-post comparison between simulation results and observed trade data reveals the model predictions to be broadly accurate, thereby validating the robustness of the modelling approach.

This work analyzes the medium term effects of the recent commodity price spike in a typical Low-I... more This work analyzes the medium term effects of the recent commodity price spike in a typical Low-Income-Food-Deficit country, Malawi, as well as a set of possible policy responses. Simulations were performed with a single-country static Computable General Equilibrium model, based on the 2004 Malawi Social Accounting Matrix provided by IFPRI, modified with data from the 2004 household budget survey. Results indicate that the increase in agricultural domestic prices was mainly driven by the raise in the cost of imported oil and chemical products. Reductions in tariff and domestic taxes, as well as subsidies on chemicals inputs, appear capable of counteracting the terms of trade shocks to some extent. However, tackling structural constraints, such as those affecting the size of agricultural marketing margins, would produce wider benefits, and improve the resilience of the economy to external shocks.

This report provides scientific evidences supporting the new Agriculture Sector Growth and Transf... more This report provides scientific evidences supporting the new Agriculture Sector Growth and Transformation Strategy in Kenya. A Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model specifically modified for the context of Kenya is used to address the impacts of six policy changes. For the purpose of the study, a desegregated version of a 2014 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) has been developed for Kenya. Multi-sectoral analytical tools are used to describe the Kenyan economy and inform about which agri-food value chains have the greatest impact in terms of output, employment and value added. Then, results of simulated policy changes are presented in this report, considering that a more careful analysis at regional and household type levels is required in order to draw robust policy recommendations.

The Turkana region of Kenya is one of the poorest areas of the country. In September 2013 the ide... more The Turkana region of Kenya is one of the poorest areas of the country. In September 2013 the identification of two huge aquifers in the Turkana region had been announced. This study, through a single-country comparative static CGE model (STAGE), analyses the economic effects of the new discoveries on Kenya. Preliminary results indicate that increases in the availabilities of potable and irrigation water individually have relatively muted effects on agricultural production.

This publication is a Technical report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commissio... more This publication is a Technical report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's science and knowledge service. It aims to provide evidence-based scientific support to the European policymaking process. The scientific output expressed does not imply a policy position of the European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for the use that might be made of this publication.

This study provides quantitative assessments for the impacts of crop yields enhancement associate... more This study provides quantitative assessments for the impacts of crop yields enhancement associated with changes in water quality and soil fertility. It employs a single country CGE (STAGE) model calibrated to an extended version of a recently constructed SAM for Egypt 2008/09. The main contribution of this study is incorporating satellite accounts for water quality indicators into the SAM/CGE framework. The SAM segments the agricultural accounts by season and by irrigation scheme; Nile waterand groundwater-dependent as well as rain-fed agricultural activities. The simulations report strong positive economy-wide impacts, which imply that the planned investments in water quality improvements are worthwhile even with very low generated crop yields. Furthermore, the results show that, without increasing irrigation water requirements, Egypt can achieve outstanding expansions in rice output and exports. This highlights the importance of by investing in improving irrigation water quality f...

This report presents potential effects of twelve free trade agreements (FTAs) under the current E... more This report presents potential effects of twelve free trade agreements (FTAs) under the current EU FTA agenda. It sheds some light on relatively balanced cumulated impacts in terms of trade, production and price for the EU agricultural sector as a whole, while quantifying also the market development for specific agricultural sectors. Different from a forecast exercise, it compares a conservative and an ambitious FTA scenario with a business as usual (reference) scenario.

Croatia joined the European Union (EU) on July 1st, 2013. This paper assesses the likely effects ... more Croatia joined the European Union (EU) on July 1st, 2013. This paper assesses the likely effects of this accession on the agricultural and food sectors, and analyses the impact on the EU, Croatia and their main trading partners. It considers both the harmonization of Croatia's trade instruments with those applied in the EU, and the adoption of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The analysis is carried out using MAGNET, a global recursive dynamic CGE model. Results show that Croatia slightly benefits from its accession to the EU with an increase in GDP, whereas the impact on the EU-27's GDP is insignificant. Total exports of Croatian agricultural products increase by 7.4% and those of food products decrease by 2%. Croatia will face some changes in its production structure. At constant prices, agricultural production benefits (increasing by 1.1%), whereas food production contracts (decreasing by 5.5%). This result sheds some light on competitiveness limitations of the Croat...

New Medit, 2021

Nile water availability is one of the major constraints for agricultural development in Egypt. Th... more Nile water availability is one of the major constraints for agricultural development in Egypt. This study conducts a mixed multiplier analysis, under water and land constraints, to identify the seasonal agricultural activities with high output and income multipliers. It uses a 2008/09 SAM for Egypt with detailed representation for Nile-related production factors employed by agricultural activities across irrigation seasons. The results demonstrate the significance of addressing Nile water constraints not only for agriculture, but also for the overall economy. Policies that enhance water productivity, particularly in winter season, generate outstanding increases in output, income, and employment through sizable multiplier effects.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is moving away from coupled payments towards an increasing e... more The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is moving away from coupled payments towards an increasing emphasis on decoupled payments. However current CGE models to study effects of decoupled payments remain limited. This paper introduces the application of a CGE model framework for a comparative analysis of possible effects caused by coupled and decoupled support on agricultural and food sectors in an economy. The CGE model used is the STAGE_AGR which is an extension of the STAGE model containing equations that permit modellers to introduce different system of decoupled payment representation. We have taken as empirical example the case of Ireland for modelling agricultural payments either as fully or partially decoupled.

Exposure to contaminated food and water-borne diseases are common in Egypt. Deteriorating water q... more Exposure to contaminated food and water-borne diseases are common in Egypt. Deteriorating water quality has been an obstacle to the development of agricultural sector, where “[c]ontamination rates have reached unacceptable levels in some agricultural areas and have had negative effects on the ability of these areas to produce safe food acceptable to local inhabitants and suitable to export”, (MALR, 2009, p. 45). The Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation (MWRI) estimates annual cost of using low quality water to be 1.8% of GDP (MWRI, 2005a). The study calibrates the single-country Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) STatic Applied General Equilibrium (STAGE 2) model to an extended and updated version of a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Egypt 2012/13. The SAM has detailed accounts for the Egyptian agricultural and irrigation systems. Water quality indicators are incorporated using satellite accounts, allowing for modelling various agronomic features; e.g. water/land salinity...

Kenya, such as other African countries, is particularly concerned about the achievement of the Su... more Kenya, such as other African countries, is particularly concerned about the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal #2 (SDG #2: zero hunger), and its associated consequences for the society. Empirical evidence about food security and nutrition in Kenya accounts for deficiencies in food access, food sufficiency and food quality at the household level. These deficiencies are among others the causes of all forms of malnutrition (stunting, wasting and overweight), which can lead to cognitive impairment, limited immunity to diseases, low educational performance, increased risk of chronic disease and even mortality cases of children in this country. To solve the food security and nutrition problems in Kenya is a challenging issue because of the different dimensions to be tackled (economic, environmental, educational, health and sanitation) and also because of the heterogeneity that characterizes households (income and food expenditure, education level of householdsâ€™ head, region...

Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, 2014

Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2016

New Medit, 2021

The concept of 'bioeconomy' is gathering momentum in European Union (EU) policy circles a... more The concept of 'bioeconomy' is gathering momentum in European Union (EU) policy circles as a sustainable model of growth to reconcile continued wealth generation and employment with bio-based sustainable resource usage. In the literature an economy-wide quantitative assessment covering the full diversity of this sector is lacking due to relatively poor data availability for disaggregated bio-based activities. This paper represents a contribution to this literature and a tentative to support the understanding of, among others, the employment generating impacts of the agriculture, food and other traditional (fishing, forestry, wood, pulp and paper) and non-traditional (biofuel, biochemical, bioenergy) bio-based sectors across the EU 28 Member States (MS). We employ a consistent and extended set of Input-Output Tables (IOTs) benchmarked to the year 2010 for the EU28 to recognize those bioeconomic sectors which potentially maximise economic value added, with a view to formulatin...

This paper presents potential effects of twelve free trade agreements (FTAs) under the current EU... more This paper presents potential effects of twelve free trade agreements (FTAs) under the current EU FTA agenda. With the help of two economic simulation models (the global CGE MAGNET and PE AGLINK), it sheds some light on relatively balanced cumulated impacts in terms of trade, production and price for the EU agricultural sector as a whole while quantifying also the market development for specific agricultural sectors. It compares a conservative and an ambitious FTA scenario with a business as usual (reference) scenario.

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a comprehensive and economy-wide database recording data abou... more A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a comprehensive and economy-wide database recording data about all transactions between economic agents in a certain economy during a certain period of time. SAMs have a triple use: on the one hand, they offer in themselves a detailed description of the economic structure and circular flows of the income of a country or region; on the other, a battery of indicators and multipliers can be obtained from them, applying directly intuitive linear models; and, finally, they are the reference database for the calibration and exploitation of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Models. This report presents the Social Accounting Matrix of Kenya for the year 2014, describing its specific structure and the basis for its estimation. In this sense, it is necessary to highlight the special structure of this SAM to reflect the Home Production for Home Consumption (HPHC) issue and a high disaggregation of agricultural and food sectors, both aspects so relevant in...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is moving away from8 coupled payments towards an increasing ... more The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is moving away from8 coupled payments towards an increasing emphasis on decoupled payments. However current CGE models to study effects of decoupled payments remain limited. This paper introduces the application of a CGE model framework for a comparative analysis of possible effects caused by coupled and decoupled support on agricultural and food sectors in an economy. The CGE model used is the STAGE_AGR which is an extension of the STAGE model containing equations that permit modellers to introduce agricultural policy instruments either as coupled or decoupled. We have taken as empirical example the case of Ireland. We start with the updating of the Irish SAM according to the economic conditions of 2007. The data base is presented with a high degree of disaggregation including 30 raw agricultural sectors and 12 processed food sectors. It contains most of the CAP payments in Ireland for the year 2007. In the simulations we assume cuts in the CAP ...

This paper examines how EU trade flows and production values are affected by introducing special ... more This paper examines how EU trade flows and production values are affected by introducing special treatment for developed countries’ sensitive products into a potential DDA agreement. In particular, it explores how the EU’s decisions regarding the size of the tariff cut for sensitive products and the corresponding size of TRQ expansion affect its protection levels, its own GDP and that of other countries and regions. It is assumed that the EU’s management of its sensitive product regime aims to maintain farm incomes and production values, rather than to minimise import access. A novelty of the paper is that it explores the extent to which achieving this aim depends on similar decisions taken by other developed countries. The simulation tool used to analyse thirteen scenarios, with a time horizon of 2020, is the global Computable General Equilibrium model GLOBE. Results indicate that the lowest tariff cuts for sensitive products may not necessarily lead to the smallest decrease in agr...

The future design of the post-2020 CAP is under consultation and includes a wide range of policy ... more The future design of the post-2020 CAP is under consultation and includes a wide range of policy options. This paper contributes to the analysis of policy alternatives by improving the CAP modelling with the Modular Applied GeNeral Equilibrium Tool (MAGNET) that allows the construction of a well-founded and plausible reference scenario (baseline) as well as diametrically opposed future visions of the CAP at the horizon 2030.

The paper describes the construction of a regional agricultural Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) fo... more The paper describes the construction of a regional agricultural Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Ireland for the year 2007. The SAM describes the full circular flow of money and goods in the Irish economy. The SAM includes 61 activities, 60 commodities, 40 factors of production, 7 households, 2 enterprises, government and investment/saving, 7 tax-related accounts, a trade and transport margin account and an external sector. Its construction starts from the Eurostat Supply and Use table for 2007. A prior unbalanced micro SAM with a regionalized agricultural sector is built with a variety of additional data sources. The final balanced SAM is estimated using the cross-entropy method.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance DAM (GERD) will become the largest dam and hydroelectric scheme i... more The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance DAM (GERD) will become the largest dam and hydroelectric scheme in Africa; it is also one of the world’s most controversial dam projects and one of four large scale hydropower projects currently under construction in Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s endowment of water resources, with its 12 major river basins, is impressive but its potential to exploit is scarcely developed (AQUASTAT, 2005). It is estimated that over 85% of the Nile waters and sediment reaching Egypt originate from the Ethiopian highlands. Nevertheless the 1959 Nile Waters Treaty, between Egypt and Sudan, allocated well over 95% of the estimated available Nile waters to Egypt (75%) and Sudan (25%) thereby leaving very little to the other 8 states in the Nile basin. This study uses a variant of the GLOBE_EN, extended by segmenting the electricity generating sector between hydro and fossil fuel powered electricity generating sections in Ethiopia, Egypt and Rest of Eastern Africa (that includes Suda...

The Emerging Senegal Plan (Plan Senegal Emergent, PSE) launched a new development model which sho... more The Emerging Senegal Plan (Plan Senegal Emergent, PSE) launched a new development model which should allow the acceleration of the economic and social development of Senegal, in the medium and long term (2035). The aim is to accelerate growth. The target set over the period 2014-2018 is between 7 and 8%. Appropriate taxation requires land reform as well as skilled technicians. It appears that property taxes are underused in Senegal although they are promising as progressive, administratively feasible and increasing along with urban sprawl. Finally, it should be stressed that real estates are is effective and fair form of taxation (Norregaard, 2013). The aim of this paper is to quantify some fiscal policy reforms in Senegal support agriculture and other sectors essential to the food and nutrition security (FNS). The model used in this study is a comparative static variant of the STatic Applied General Equilibrium model (STAGE) (McDonald, 2007) specifically extended for the context of...

This paper provides a model-based impact analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the ... more This paper provides a model-based impact analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the four main regional blocks in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It uses the Modular Agricultural GeNeral Equilibrium Tool (MAGNET), a multi-region computable general equilibrium model. To provide a comprehensive analysis, other key EU policies, such as trade or GHG policies, are modelled as well. A thoroughly prepared reference scenario is contrasted with a counterfactual scenario, where the CAP is removed and ambitious trade agreements with non-African EU trade partners are implemented. Results provide interesting insights into the identification and quantification of - mainly indirect - effects of the CAP in SSA. Acknowledgement :

Africa, more specifically Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), largely missed out on the green revolution an... more Africa, more specifically Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), largely missed out on the green revolution and hence is considered that the continent is long overdue for an agricultural boon like that lifted other regions such as Asia. Given this background, in this paper a global CGE Model is used to analyze the economy-wide effects of a potential ‘green revolution’ in SSA. Following many studies in the literature a potential green revolution is modelled as an increase in TFP, on the other hand, the uniqueness of this study is the introduction of the observed and desired yield changes (following past observed green revolutions such as in Asia) and let the model determine the required TFP change to attain these yield levels. Further, a stochastic yield change is introduced as a shock to the CGE model by using a Gaussian Quadrature approach. This way, instead of presenting only one point for a probable green revolution one can analyse the effects of a green revolution under a full spectrum of po...

Food security remains a key challenge in many Sub-Saharan African countries and in Kenya in parti... more Food security remains a key challenge in many Sub-Saharan African countries and in Kenya in particular. Despite the astonishing improvement achieved in the last decades, still a relevant share of the population lives below the minimum level of dietary energy consumption. Kenya addresses this concern with a noteworthy policy mix, aiming at giving to the agricultural sector a leading task in improving food security. In this paper, through a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model specifically modified for the context of developing country analyses, we address the impacts of three input policy options with reference to increases in fertiliser use, seed quality and irrigation investment. For the purpose of the study, a desegregated version of a 2014 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) has been developed for Kenya. First results of simulated policy changes present overall positive effects on key food security aggregates related to food availability and access. Nevertheless a more careful analysis at regional and household type levels is required in order to draw wide-ranging policy recommendations.

This study provides quantitative assessments for the impacts of efficiency enhancement for differ... more This study provides quantitative assessments for the impacts of efficiency enhancement for different types of irrigation water under water scarcity conditions. It employs a single country CGE (STAGE) model calibrated to an extended version of a recently constructed SAM for Egypt 2008/09. The SAM segments the agricultural accounts by season and by irrigation scheme; Nile water-and groundwater-dependent as well as rain-fed agricultural activities. The simulations show that Egypt should manage potential reductions in the supply for Nile water with more efficient irrigation practice that secures higher productivity for Nile water, groundwater and irrigated land. The results suggests more ambitious plan to boost irrigation efficiency for summer rice in order to overweight any potential shrinkages in its output and exports. Furthermore, even doubling all non-conventional water resources is not sufficient to compensate the potential adverse impacts of Nile water losses. This highlights the importance of irrigation efficiency for the Egyptian economy.