Targeting food subsidies for the needy
1983
Mateus, Abel Moreira
This paper summarizes the experience of several countries in setting-up food distribution programs, from untargeted food subsidies schemes to targeted systems like ration shops strategically located, self-targeting by commodity, and food stamp programs to the highly targeted special intervention nutrition programs. A main contribution of the paper to the literature on this topic is the construction and actual implementation of a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate food policy systems. Starting from a concept of consumer surplus, a derived distribution scheme is applied to compute the social consumer surplus. The social producer surplus is also computed to measure the impact of the different schemes on domestic farmers. Finally, the different costs of running the system from food costs to administrative costs are considered. The second major contribution is a detailed description of the institutional design and a critical evaluation of the systems that have been implemented in several countries following a typology developed in the paper.
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