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Author: Headey, Derek D.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 13
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Book Description
This study assesses the welfare impacts of COVID-19 on households in Myanmar by combining recent high-frequency telephone survey evidence for two specific rural and urban geographies with national-level survey-based simulations designed to assess ex-ante impacts on poverty with differing amounts of targeted cash transfers. The first source of evidence – the COVID-19 Rural and Urban Food Security Survey (C19- RUFSS) – consists of four rounds of monthly data collected from a sample of over 2,000 households, all with young children or pregnant mothers, divided evenly between urban and peri-urban Yangon and the rural Dry Zone. This survey sheds light on household incomes prior to COVID-19 (January 2020), incomes and food security status soon after the first COVID-19 wave (June 2020), the gradual economic recovery thereafter (July and August 2020), and the start of the second COVID-19 wave in September and October 2020. This survey gives timely and high-quality evidence on the recent welfare impacts of COVID-19 for two important geographies and for households that are nutritionally highly vulnerable to shocks due to the presence of very young children or pregnant mothers. However, the relatively narrow geographic and demographic focus of this telephone survey and the need for forecasting the poverty impacts of COVID-19 into 2021 prompt us to explore simulationbased evidence derived by applying parameter shocks to household models developed from nationally representative household survey data collected prior to COVID-19, the 2015 Myanmar Poverty and Living Conditions Survey (MPLCS). By realistically simulating the kinds of disruptions imposed on Myanmar’s economy by both international forces, e.g., lower agricultural exports and workers’ remittances, and domestic COVID-19 prevention measures. e.g., stay-at-home orders and temporary business closures, we not only can predict the impacts of COVID-19 on household poverty at the rural, urban, and national levels, but also can assess the further benefits to household welfare of social protection in the form of monthly household cash transfers of different magnitudes. Combined, these two sources of evidence yield insights on both the on-the-ground impacts of COVID-19 in recent months and the potential poverty reduction impacts of social protection measures in the coming year. We conclude the study with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings.
Author: Headey, Derek D.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 13
Get Book
Book Description
This study assesses the welfare impacts of COVID-19 on households in Myanmar by combining recent high-frequency telephone survey evidence for two specific rural and urban geographies with national-level survey-based simulations designed to assess ex-ante impacts on poverty with differing amounts of targeted cash transfers. The first source of evidence – the COVID-19 Rural and Urban Food Security Survey (C19- RUFSS) – consists of four rounds of monthly data collected from a sample of over 2,000 households, all with young children or pregnant mothers, divided evenly between urban and peri-urban Yangon and the rural Dry Zone. This survey sheds light on household incomes prior to COVID-19 (January 2020), incomes and food security status soon after the first COVID-19 wave (June 2020), the gradual economic recovery thereafter (July and August 2020), and the start of the second COVID-19 wave in September and October 2020. This survey gives timely and high-quality evidence on the recent welfare impacts of COVID-19 for two important geographies and for households that are nutritionally highly vulnerable to shocks due to the presence of very young children or pregnant mothers. However, the relatively narrow geographic and demographic focus of this telephone survey and the need for forecasting the poverty impacts of COVID-19 into 2021 prompt us to explore simulationbased evidence derived by applying parameter shocks to household models developed from nationally representative household survey data collected prior to COVID-19, the 2015 Myanmar Poverty and Living Conditions Survey (MPLCS). By realistically simulating the kinds of disruptions imposed on Myanmar’s economy by both international forces, e.g., lower agricultural exports and workers’ remittances, and domestic COVID-19 prevention measures. e.g., stay-at-home orders and temporary business closures, we not only can predict the impacts of COVID-19 on household poverty at the rural, urban, and national levels, but also can assess the further benefits to household welfare of social protection in the form of monthly household cash transfers of different magnitudes. Combined, these two sources of evidence yield insights on both the on-the-ground impacts of COVID-19 in recent months and the potential poverty reduction impacts of social protection measures in the coming year. We conclude the study with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings.
Author: Headey, Derek D.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 28
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Book Description
Myanmar had one of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 caseloads in the world in mid-2020 and was one of the few developing countries not projected to go into economic recession. However, macroeconomic projections are likely to be a poor guide to individual and household welfare in a fast-moving crisis that has involved disruption to an unusually wide range of sectors and livelihoods. To explore the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on household poverty and coping strategies, as well as maternal food insecurity experiences, this study used a telephone survey conducted in June and July 2020 covering 2,017 mothers of nutritionally vulnerable young children in urban Yangon and rural villages of Myanmar’s Dry Zone. Stratifying results by location, livelihoods, and asset-levels, and using retrospective questions on pre-COVID-19 incomes and various COVID-19 impacts, we find that the vast majority of households have been adversely affected from loss of income and employment. Over three-quarters cite income/job losses as the main impact of COVID-19 – median incomes declined by one third and $1.90/day income-based poverty rose by around 27 percentage points between January and June 2020. Falling into poverty was most strongly associated with loss of employment (including migrant employment), but also with recent childbirth. The poor commonly coped with income losses through taking loans/credit, while better-off households drew down on savings and reduced non-food expenditures. Self-reported food insecurity experiences were much more common in the urban sample than in the rural sample, even though income-based and asset-based poverty were more prevalent in rural areas. In urban areas, around one quarter of respondents were worried about food quantities and quality, and around 10 percent stated that there were times when they had run out of food or gone hungry. Respondents who stated that their household had lost income or experienced food supply problems due to COVID-19 were more likely to report a variety of different food insecurity experiences. These results raise the concern that the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are much more serious and widespread than macroeconomic projections would suggest. Loss of employment and casual labor are major drivers of increasing poverty. Consequently, economic recovery strategies must emphasize job creation to revitalize damaged livelihoods. However, a strengthened social protection strategy should also be a critical component of economic recovery to prevent adversely affected households from falling into poverty traps and to avert the worst forms of food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly among households with pregnant women and young children. The recent second wave of COVID-19 infections in Myanmar from mid-August onwards makes the expansion of social protection even more imperative.
Author: Derek Headey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Myanmar had one of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 caseloads in the world in mid-2020 and was one of the few developing countries not projected to go into economic recession. However, macroeconomic projections are likely to be a poor guide to individual and household welfare in a fast-moving crisis that has involved disruption to an unusually wide range of sectors and livelihoods. To explore the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on household poverty and coping strategies, as well as maternal food insecurity experiences, this study used a telephone survey conducted in June and July 2020 covering 2,017 mothers of nutritionally vulnerable young children in urban Yangon and rural villages of Myanmar's Dry Zone.Stratifying results by location, livelihoods, and asset-levels, and using retrospective questions on pre-COVID-19 incomes and various COVID-19 impacts, we find that the vast majority of households have been adversely affected from loss of income and employment. Over three-quarters cite income/job losses as the main impact of COVID-19 - median incomes declined by one third and $1.90/day income-based poverty rose by around 27 percentage points between January and June 2020. Falling into poverty was most strongly associated with loss of employment (including migrant employment), but also with recent childbirth. The poor commonly coped with income losses through taking loans/credit, while better-off households drew down on savings and reduced non-food expenditures. Self-reported food insecurity experiences were much more common in the urban sample than in the rural sample, even though income-based and asset-based poverty were more prevalent in rural areas. In urban areas, around one quarter of respondents were worried about food quantities and quality, and around 10 percent stated that there were times when they had run out of food or gone hungry. Respondents who stated that their household had lost income or experienced food supply problems due to COVID-19 were more likely to report a variety of different food insecurity experiences.These results raise the concern that the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are much more serious and widespread than macroeconomic projections would suggest. Loss of employment and casual labor are major drivers of increasing poverty. Consequently, economic recovery strategies must emphasize job creation to revitalize damaged livelihoods. However, a strengthened social protection strategy should also be a critical component of economic recovery to prevent adversely affected households from falling into poverty traps and to avert the worst forms of food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly among households with pregnant women and young children. The recent second wave of COVID-19 infections in Myanmar from mid-August onwards makes the expansion of social protection even more imperative.
Author: Headey, Derek D.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 17
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Book Description
Amid extreme uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic, economic policymakers have struggled to respond to rapidly changing circumstances with appropriate speed and scale. One policy obstacle is the dearth of real-time indicators of the pandemic’s economic impacts, especially in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Here we show that an ‘immobility’ indicator from GoogleTM – measuring the extent to which consumers are staying at home more – is a powerful predictor of changes in household poverty in Myanmar, as well as aggregate national consumption and gross domestic product (GDP) in cross-country data. Combined, this evidence suggests that real-time mobility indicators have the potential to inform a wide range of policy deliberations, including forecasting models, fine-tuning the timing of both economic stimulus and social protection interventions, and tracking economic recovery from this unprecedented crisis.
Author: Ragasa, Catherine
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 29
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Book Description
This study provides an assessment of changes in household income, livelihood sources, food consumption, and diet quality during the first months of the COVID-19 crisis in a sample of households drawn from both urban and rural areas in Ghana. Phone surveys were conducted in June 2020 with 423 urban consumers in Accra and with 369 small-scale crop and fish farmers in rural areas in six regions in middle and southern Ghana. Data was disaggregated by asset quintiles for both the urban and the rural samples. Reduction in incomes were reported by 83 percent of urban households in Accra, mainly due to business closures and lower sales from their trading enterprises. Most households, however, are showing resilience in terms of food consumption, with a majority of urban consumers surveyed maintaining their pre-COVID-19 level of food consumption; only 9 percent of urban consumers reported reductions in food consumption to cope with income loss due to COVID-19. For the respondents in the rural areas in middle and southern Ghana, 76 percent reported income loss, and all reported that their livelihoods had been affected. Thirty-four percent of 2020 minor season crop farmers experienced difficulty in selling their produce, and 43 percent of all sample crop farmers anticipated difficulties in accessing inputs in the 2020 major season, mainly fertilizers and agrochemicals. Of those growing fish, 53 percent experienced difficulty in accessing inputs, mainly feeds; 60 percent reported increased input prices; and 64 percent of those harvesting from March to June 2020 experienced difficulties in selling their fish because of lower demand, lower tilapia prices, and higher transportation costs. Despite farm and nonfarm income losses, a majority of households in the rural sample reported maintaining previous levels of diet diversity and food consumption - only 11 percent reported reducing their food consumption to cope with income loss. Several months into the COVID-19 crisis in Ghana, households in both rural and urban areas showed some resilience in terms of their agricultural production and food consumption. Regular monitoring is needed, however, especially if household savings start to dry up and coping mechanisms become more restrictive.
Author: Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA)
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 19
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Book Description
National poverty rates in Myanmar have risen dramatically due to economic disruption following the February 1, 2021 military take-over of government. Depending on assumptions about the scale of the economic impacts, household poverty rates are predicted to have risen to between 40 and 50 percent in 2021, compared to 32 percent in 2015 and just under 25 percent in 2017. Between 849,000 and 1.87 million new households are thus living in poverty in 2021 in addition to the estimated 2.86 million households already in poverty in 2015. The poverty impacts of these disruptions are significant not only in the sharp increases in the total number of households in poverty, but also in the substantial deepening of poverty for households that were already poor. By the end of the current financial year, the average poverty gap (expenditure shortfall) is predicted to have increased from 26 percent in 2015 to between 34 and 40 percent for individuals living in poor households.
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
ISBN: 9251379971
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
The evidence review for dietary guidance is the first step in establishing the Myanmar food based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) for pregnant and lactating women and children under 5 years old. The review process followed a systematic approach to gather, assess and analyse data and information related to food, diet and nutrient intakes of the Myanmar people, agricultural production and food supply, food sustainability, cultural food preference and behaviour, prevalence of malnutrition and diet-related diseases. The evidence review provides justifications for making FBDG recommendations based on up-to-date and country-specific information, as well as the global evidence base. The evidence review increases the transparency of the evidence-based process in establishing the Myanmar FBDGs. Moreover, The evidence review for dietary guidance is the first structured evidence review to guide FBDGs development in Myanmar.
Author: Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA)
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 28
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Book Description
Myanmar experienced four distinct COVID shocks to its economy over 2020 to early 2022 as well as a military takeover in February 2021 that created severe political, civil and economic turmoil. COVID and the coup d’état reversed a decade of growth and poverty reduction, but the full extent of the crisis on household poverty has remained uncertain because of the challenges of conducting large-scale in-person welfare surveys during the pandemic and recent political instability. Here we combine ex ante simulation models with diverse phone survey evidence from mid-2020 to early 2022 to estimate the poverty impacts of these shocks and some of the mechanisms behind them. Both simulations and surveys are consistent in painting a grim picture of rising poverty, capital-depleting coping mechanisms, and the complete collapse of government-provided social protection.
Author: Sitko, N., Knowles M., Viberti, F., Bordi, D.
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
ISBN: 9251353395
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 69
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Book Description
In this paper we focus specifically on differences in the welfare impacts of COVID-19 on rural livelihoods between countries using nationally representative data that we disaggregate by food system typology. This typology captures key structural differences in the organization of rural economies and the vulnerabilities to rural livelihoods due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown measures. In particular, we draw on household survey data collected from 54 countries through the World Bank’s COVID-19 High Frequency Monitoring Dashboard to generate descriptive data on COVID-19 impacts in rural areas across three dimensions: income, coping strategies and food security. These descriptive data are disaggregated into four food system categories and contextualized and validated through a systematic review of rigorous, survey-based studies of COVID-19 impacts in rural areas. Through this analysis, the report provides insights on how COVID-19 is influencing rural livelihoods, how its impacts vary between countries and food system typologies, and, ultimately, how policymakers and the international community need to respond in order to foster an inclusive and sustainable recovery.
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
ISBN: 9251378142
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The status of women in agrifood systems report uses extensive new data and analyses to provide a comprehensive picture of women’s participation, benefits, and challenges they face working in agrifood systems globally. The report shows how increasing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agrifood systems enhances women’s well-being and the well-being of their households, creating opportunities for economic growth, greater incomes, productivity and resilience. The report comes more than a decade after the publication of the State of food and agriculture (SOFA) 2010–11: Women in agriculture – Closing the gender gap for development. SOFA 2010–11 documented the tremendous costs of gender inequality not only for women but also for agriculture and the broader economy and society, making the business case for closing existing gender gaps in accessing agricultural assets, inputs and services. Moving beyond agriculture, The status of women in agrifood systems reflects not only on how gender equality and women’s empowerment are central to the transition towards sustainable and resilient agrifood systems but also on how the transformation of agrifood systems can contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the available evidence on gender equality and women’s empowerment in agrifood systems that has been produced over the last decade. The report also provides policymakers and development actors with an extensive review of what has worked, highlighting the promise of moving from closing specific gender gaps towards the adoption of gender-transformative approaches that explicitly address the formal and informal structural constraints to equality. It concludes with specific recommendations on the way forward. Last update 03/08/2023
