Trade Liberalization

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The role of trade liberalisation with food security is an urgent issue and has been investigated for a long time. Generally, it is widely accepted that trade liberalisation is crucial determinant to guarantee food availability through import and export activities. It also provides more diversified choice with lower price. Furthermore, free trade promotes economic growth through specialisation, technology transfer, knowledge spillover and export revenue (Wacziarg and Welch, 2008). However, economic growth does not guarantee that people will have enough necessary food because of the dependence on income distribution and other factors. In fact, no literature and evidence have been found in explaining how trade affects food security comprehensively. …show more content…

According to the theory of globalisation, trade, investment, communication, information flows, cultural exchange, and politic cooperation are always coexistent issues and affect significantly when a nation decides to open their economy. Previous studies have always considered trade as an independent issue in the estimation, and this is a significant limitation. Modern economic theory reflects the fact that human and technological resources are one of the essential resources for economic development and this is impulsed by trade and investment liberalisation. Moreover, the theory of modernisation emphasises that investment, technology, education and cultural modernisation are important resources to promote economic development and increase social welfare. However, since Sub-Sahara Africa is the lowest income area of the world, the impact of free trade on their income may be different. Furthermore, Ortega and Peri (2014) suggest mix results. One side, they find significant evidence of the positive effect of openness to immigration on long-run income per capita. But they can not determine the effect of trade openness on income. Therefore, particular research for Sub-Saharan Africa is …show more content…

He also suggests and emphasises the importance of physical and social infrastructure investment on food security. Besides, he argues that “food supply and availability are not the primary food security challenges in urban areas”. However, the biggest challenge is about access capacity to food and the financial ability of households, which affects to shortage and food utilisation. Same idea, Crush et al. (2012) suggest that food access is the major problem of food security, not about food supply.
However, previous studies have only addressed the issue of infrastructure investment, whereas investment efficiency is the decisive factor. In particular, for countries with high levels of corruption such as Africa, investment effectiveness is an ambiguous issue and needs to be addressed and researched. We believe that only research on road density and shipping connectivity does indeed directly reflect the impact of transport infrastructure on food

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