The impact of food inflation on urban poverty and its monetary cost: some back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations
基于72个发展中国家的数据，估算近期食品价格上涨对消除城市贫困所需资金成本的影响，发现多数国家成本低于GDP的0.2%，但最严重国家可能超过3%。
Abstract This article uses a sample of 72 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices. This cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit (PD), that is, the variation in financial resources required to eliminate poverty under perfect targeting. The results show that, for most countries, the cost represents less than 0.2% of gross domestic product. However, in the most severely affected, it may exceed 3%. In all countries, the change in the PD is mostly due to the negative real income effect of those households that were poor before the price shock, while the cost attributable to new households falling into poverty is negligible. Thus, in countries where transfer mechanisms with effective targeting already exist, the most cost‐effective strategy would be to scale up such programs rather than designing tools to identify the new poor.