Research

International climate cooperation remains challenging as countries differ widely in their economic and spatial structures, which creates uneven incentives to mitigate emissions. Since trade already reflects these geographic differences, it offers a natural lever for climate cooperation. Focusing on the agricultural sector, this paper develops a general equilibrium model that incorporates spatial and structural features in an open economy and couples it with a simultaneous-move climate club formation game. The objective is to study whether trade liberalization can foster climate coalition formation without generating unintended consequences. Calibrating the model to real-world data, we simulate multiple coalition formation scenarios reflecting alternative behavioral responses by countries. The results show that agricultural trade liberalization can effectively incentivize countries to join a stable climate coalition, yielding significant global greenhouse gas emission reductions and welfare gains. However, these benefits may come with important trade-offs. Agricultural trade incentives directly interact with food consumption patterns and both the intensive and extensive margins of production. Examining the broader climate and socio-economic effects, we find that the resulting coalitions may increase livestock-related emissions, exacerbate food security imbalances, and intensify land-use change emissions, particularly in tropical regions.

Climate aid is an international financial flow that promotes mitigation and adaptation to climate change while supporting local economic development. This study examines the impact of climate aid on deforestation in Africa from 2001 to 2021. Using a novel dataset of geocoded aid projects that we classify as pursuing climate-related objectives by applying a machine learning model, we find evidence of a causal link between climate aid and forest loss by applying an instrumental variable strategy. On average, deforestation increases by 94 hectares for every additional 1 million USD of geocoded climate aid projects disbursed. Over the complete period and spatial extent, 5% of deforestation is linked to the disbursement of climate aid projects. These effects are heterogeneous and vary by initial forest cover: aid increases deforestation in densely forested areas. Analysis of the mechanisms suggests that the effects are primarily driven by economic funding for mitigation and production-related activities, with agricultural expansion as the main channel linking climate aid to deforestation. When valuing the associated emissions, climate aid-induced deforestation corresponds to approximately 0.06 GtCO2/yr.

To most people, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is synonymous with hunger and starvation. However, overweight and obesity are currently also a major public health concern in this region, sometimes even more than the prevalence of underweight. Despite the significant increase in the average body mass index (BMI) in SSA, the existing literature still considers a positive association between household socioeconomic status (SES) and individual BMI, suggesting that excess weight is a symbol of wealth while thinness is linked to poverty. This article aims to update this traditional and probably outdated perception by investigating potential nonlinearities and heterogeneity in the relationship between SES and BMI in SSA. First, we pool several cross-sectional female adult-oriented demographic and health surveys that are representative of a large number of SSA countries from 1990 to 2019. Second, we implement both ordinary least-squares (OLS) and instrumental variables (IV) regressions. Once a comprehensive set of observed characteristics was controlled for, OLS estimates suggest a nonlinear association between SES indicators and female BMI, taking a U-inverted shape. IV corrections controlling for reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity reveal similar trends, confirming the overrepresentation of excess weight in intermediate levels of wealth and education. Furthermore, this study dates the social shift of the obesity burden in SSA: changing from positive to curvilinear from the end of the 1990s, including for countries currently classified as lower middle income. To conclude, this article contributes to the literature by demonstrating the ongoing nutrition transition in SSA and the role of an emergent middle class in the rise of the obesity epidemic. This result has important implications for public health policies.

Globally, the literature tends to emphasize negative associations between socioeconomic status (SES) and bodyweight in countries improving their economic development. However, little is known about the social distribution of obesity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where economic growth has been highly heterogeneous over the last few decades. This paper reviews an exhaustive set of recent empirical studies examining its association in low- and lower-middle-income countries in SSA. Although there is evidence of a positive association between SES and obesity in low-income countries, we found mixed associations in lower-middle-income countries, potentially providing evidence of a social reversal of the obesity burden.