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.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in severe income losses, but little is known about its impacts on diets and nutritional adequacy, or the effectiveness of social protection interventions in mitigating dietary and nutritional impacts. We first assess the likely impacts of COVID-19 shocks in Bangladesh and Myanmar on poverty and food and nutrient consumption gaps. We then analyze the estimated mitigating effects of five hypothetical social protection interventions of a typical monetary value: (1) cash transfers; (2) in-kind transfers of common rice; (3) in-kind transfers of fortified rice enriched with multiple essential micronutrients; (4) vouchers for a diversified basket of rice and non-staple foods; and (5) food vouchers with fortified rice instead of common rice. The simulation results suggest modest effectiveness of the cash transfers for mitigating poverty increases and little effectiveness of all five transfers for preventing increasing food and nutrient consumption gaps among the poorest 40%. Rice fortification is, however, effective at closing key micronutrient consumption gaps and could be a suitable policy instrument for averting ‘hidden hunger’ during economic crises.

The recent history of rural economic transformation in Myanmar and the effects of COVID-19 and the military coup in February 2021 provide important lessons for the design and implementation of plans to help the country recover from these scourges. The impoverishment of farming communities in Myanmar during decades of socialist military rule, beginning in the 1960s until the turn of the century, led to an outflux of migrants to neighboring countries. As the country opened up to foreign investment through economic reforms initiated in 2011, rural wages surged and farm mechanization services expanded rapidly. Together with increased remittance flows from migrants, higher rural household incomes drove growth in a wide range of non-farm service enterprises. Nevertheless, agricultural growth was low and most crop subsectors stagnated due to underlying and unresolved structural constraints such as poor infrastructure and inequality in land access. As in many other countries in Asia, border closures and lockdowns instituted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 resulted in widespread employment and income losses. The Myanmar government pro-actively sought to mitigate the impacts through expanded credit to farmers and businesses. By the end of 2020, Myanmar was beginning to recover from the economic stresses of COVID-19. However, the February 2021 military coup resulted in a far more severe economic downturn than COVID-19 due to the collapse of the financial system, the massive resignations by public sector employees, and the prolonged movement restrictions. Coup-induced state failure greatly magnified the health and economic consequences of COVID-19 in terms of poverty, food insecurity, and stalled economic transformation. This paper uses a combination of macro, meso, and micro-level analyses to measure the impacts of COVID-19 and state failure on rural economic transformation through the lens of the agri-food system, and to draw lessons for policies to support broad-based and resilient economic recovery.

Poverty measurement in low and middle income countries (LMICs) has always been challenging, especially among rural households whose incomes are characterized by seasonality, informality and some degree of subsistence consumption. During the COVID-19 pandemic poverty measurement became even more challenging as research had to resort phone surveys, who necessary brevity precludes the use of detailed household expenditure modules preferred in rural settings. Phone surveys instead typically resorted to qualitative questions on income losses and other welfare impacts of economic shocks. Here we use the new nationally representative Myanmar Household Welfare Survey (MHWS) to experiment with three kinds of poverty measures: (1) Asset poverty (10 questions); (2) Income poverty (a maximum of 17 questions); and (3) Food expenditure poverty (based on 4 questions). We first describe the methods for constructing these three indicators – including the poverty lines used for income and food poverty – and their conceptual strengths and weaknesses, before turning to a descriptive analysis of their geographical patterns, their associations with each other and with expenditure-based poverty in the last national survey in 2017. We then test their ability to predict poor diet quality and experiences of hunger, which – based on previous studies – are outcomes that ought to be highly sensitive to household poverty. We draw three important conclusions for measuring poverty in phone surveys. First, asset poverty and income poverty are strongly associated with each other, and with state/region poverty patterns of expenditure-based poverty in 2017. Second, asset poverty was consistently the strongest predictor of poor diet diversity among adults and children, as well as food insecurity at the household level, but income poverty also predicted these outcomes even after controlling for asset poverty. Third, we argue that phone surveys should measure both asset and income poverty, but should likely steer clear of food expenditure measures, which will either require overly long survey instruments, or very short questionnaires susceptible to underestimate of expenditure and overestimation of poverty. However, asset and income poverty are relatively quick and easy to measure, and conceptual complements to each other: income poverty is likely to be sensitive to shocks and seasonality, while asset poverty is insensitive to these fluctuations but captures long-term wealth. Finally, another important benefit of measuring income poverty is its ability to capture the effects of inflationary shocks, as inflation can affect both nominal incomes (e.g. through unemployment) as well as through the analyst’s price adjustments to the real food poverty line.

An illuminating, indispensable analysis of a watershed moment and its possible aftermath. For people and governments around the world, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to place the preservation of human life at odds with the pursuit of economic and social life. Yet this naive alternative belies the complexity of the entanglements the crisis has created and revealed not just between health and wealth but also around morality, knowledge, governance, culture, and everyday subsistence. Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade have assembled an eminent team of scholars from across the social sciences to reflect on the myriad ways SARS-CoV-2 has entered, reshaped, or exacerbated existing trends and structures in every part of the globe. The contributors show how the disruptions caused by the pandemic have both hastened the rise of new social divisions and hardened old inequalities and dilemmas. An indispensable volume, Pandemic Exposures provides an illuminating analysis of this watershed moment and its possible aftermath.

After strong growth in 2017 and early 2018, global economic activity slowed notably in the second half of last year, reflecting a confluence of factors affecting major economies. China’s growth declined following a combination of needed regulatory tightening to rein in shadow banking and an increase in trade tensions with the United States. The euro area economy lost more momentum than expected as consumer and business confidence weakened and car production in Germany was disrupted by the introduction of new emission standards; investment dropped in Italy as sovereign spreads widened; and external demand, especially from emerging Asia, softened. Elsewhere, natural disasters hurt activity in Japan. Trade tensions increasingly took a toll on business confidence and, so, financial market sentiment worsened, with financial conditions tightening for vulnerable emerging markets in the spring of 2018 and then in advanced economies later in the year, weighing on global demand. Conditions have eased in 2019 as the US Federal Reserve signaled a more accommodative monetary policy stance and markets became more optimistic about a US–China trade deal, but they remain slightly more restrictive than in the fall.

The dramatic surge in food prices from 2005 to 2008 seriously threatened the world's poor, who struggle to buy food even under normal circumstances, and led to protests and riots in the developing world. The crisis eventually receded, but such surges could recur unless steps are taken to prevent them. Using up-to-date information, the authors of Reflections on the Global Food Crisis identify the key causes of the food price surge, its consequences for global poverty, and the challenges involved in preventing another crisis. Breaking from many earlier interpretations, the authors conclude that the crisis was not primarily fostered by increased demand for meat products in rising economies such as China and India or by declines in agricultural yields or food stocks, or by futures market speculation. Instead, they attribute the rising food prices to a combination of rising energy prices, growing demand for biofuels, the U.S. dollar depreciation; and various trade shocks related to export restrictions, panic purchases and unfavorable weather. As part of their analysis, the authors also provide the first comprehensive review of both the macroeconomic and microeconomic consequences of the crisis, as well as a detailed comparison of the current crisis with the food price crisis of 1974. To prevent another crisis, the authors conclude that the global food system should be reformed through several key steps: make trade in agricultural commodities more free yet more secure; address long-term threats to agricultural productivity, such as climate change and resource degradation; scale up social protection in potentially food insecure countries; and encourage agricultural production in at least some of the countries now heavily dependent on food imports. Reflections on the Global Food Crisis will be a valuable resource for policymakers, development specialists, and others concerned with the world's poorest people.