Agricultural (dis)Incentives and Food Security: Is there a Link?”

This paper analyzes the impact of agricultural (dis)incentives on food security for a wide sample of countries over the period 1990-2010 using the World Bank database on distortions to agricultural incentives. We adopt a continuous treatment approach applying a generalized propensity score matching to reduce potential biases stemming from dierence in observed country characteristics. The results provide strong evidence of self-selection and heterogeneous food security impacts at dierent levels of policy intensity. Estimates of the dose-response functions show that both discrimination against agriculture and large support lead to poor performances in several dimensions of FS.