Energy price shocks—negative and positive—can have a powerful economic knock-on effect, especially on food prices where food is scarce. Even though great strides have been made since 1945 in feeding Asia’s huge populations, more than 500 million people still face food insecurity. Of the world’s undernourished, almost 65% live in Asia.

Food insecurity stems from the link between energy prices and food prices, among other causes.

A survey of Bangladesh, the People’s Republic of China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Viet Nam from 2010 to 2016 proposed a model with eight variables affecting agricultural food prices—land prices, GDP, inflation rates, oil prices, biofuel prices, employment in agriculture, labor costs, and real interest rates.

Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary, one of the authors of ADBI’s research on this topic, sums up the survey’s findings.

Read the transcript

https://bit.ly/2LPmZuB

Read the working paper

https://www.adb.org/publications/volatility-linkages-between-energy-and-food-prices-asian-countries

About the authors

Naoyuki Yoshino is the dean of the Asian Development Bank Institute.

Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary is an assistant professor of economics at Waseda University, Tokyo.

Ehsan Rasoulinezhad is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Tehran, Iran.

Know more about ADBI’s work

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