A Comment on “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia”
评论了Bellemare等人关于食品价格稳定福利效应的论文，指出其对零收入家庭的处理扭曲了预算份额分布，并展示了修正后的结果，发现价格稳定的分配受益方向发生逆转。
This comment discusses the robustness of the policy implications of Bellemare, Barrett, and Just's paper, “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia” (2013). Bellemare, Barrett, and Just present a theoretical and empirical approach to the estimation of willingness to pay for food price stabilization that accounts for the covolatility of prices, making a significant contribution to the literature. However, in the course of applying their model to data from rural Ethiopia, the authors make an empirical assumption in the treatment of zero‐valued income households that produces a distortion in the distribution of household budget shares. This comment identifies the consequences of this assumption for the estimated relationship of poor and wealthy households' willingness to pay for food commodity price stabilization, and shows the results one would obtain under a different, distribution‐preserving treatment of zero‐valued income. The key finding is that the distributional benefit incidence of food price stabilization found in Bellemare, Barrett, and Just (2013) is reversed when the budget share of marketable surplus is calculated over observed, as opposed to mean, household income where available.